Thanks Jon,

Customer has an IT guy who thinks that 10/100 switches will become obsolete/eos within the next seven years.

AFAIA 10/100 port switches still account for most new LAN deployments so I think this is highly unlikely....I hope I'm right!

Gurmakh

Gurmakh

When i was answering i was primarily thinking about a current setup where you have a 10Mbs WAN link and someone was proposing to upgrade to gigabit to the desktop as a way to increase throughput. So what i said still stands.

But if you are looking at a new deployment it may well be worth considering buying gigabit capable switches even if you don't intend to use the gigabit functionality straight away.

Two main reasons

1) Bandwidth is getting cheaper. Admittedly we are all going through a difficult time financially at present but that won't be the case forever. All you need is a link above 100Mbps to the WAN and then your LAN infrastructure "could" become a bottleneck. I say could because you would still have multiple clients accessing the WAN at any one time so it is more likely that 100Mbps link will still be the limiting factor

2) Flexibility - it may be that further down the line that remote site needs to use apps that move large amounts of data and the business is suffering because of the WAN links. There may then be a case to move the servers locally.

Personally having everything in a data centre is in my opinion a better solution for many reasons but if the business is unable to function properly because of this setup then it's not really fit for purpose.

As with all things design it comes down to many factors not least of which is budget. If deploying gigabit capable switches made little difference to the overall cost then why not. Most people deploy Cat 5e/6 now even though they are not necessarily running gigabit speeds over it.

But if you need to cut costs and choosing 10/100 capable switches only gets you within the budget then with a 10Mbps WAN link i would still say this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

As for 10/100 switches being obsolete. Well it depends what he meant by that exactly. I think the cost of hardware will continue to drop the point where buying a gigabit switch is like buying a 10/100 switch now. But I still think there will be a place for 10/100 within the Enterprise. Your initial scenario is a good case in point.

Jon

Most people don't need gig to the desktop for end users . Servers and such could benefit . I think I have seen maybe 2 or 3 instances where they were even able to fill a 100 meg pipe so for most end users gig is not a neccesity, 100 meg is a pretty big pipe. Gig is really only needed in server switches for the most part but it makes for a big marketing target .

Glen and Leo bring up a couple of common objections to desktop gig, either users really don't need it or workstations don't have the processing capability to utilize it. (This is a bit of déjà vu, for those of us who experienced the 10 to 100 transition.)

On the "need it" issue, unless there's absoluting no benefit to the additional bandwidth, it might be hard to argue there's no need, although the cost vs. benefit issue is a different issue. (One of the biggest cost factors is the cabling plant if it doesn't support the higher bandwidth.)

As to host performance, providing better than 100 Mbps thoughput shouldn't be impractical for most recent vintage PCs. Any PC that can support USB 2.0 (480 Mbps), Firewire (400 Mbps), ATA PATA 133 (about gig) or SATA-150 (about 1.2 gig) with PCI 32-bit/33 MHz (about gig) or later bus architecture should have sufficient performance for a gig NIC. (BTW, a PC that has a disk drive that averages "only" 50 MB/s [400 Mbps], a 100 Mbps NIC is somewhat slow compared to it. A gig NIC would permit network I/O to match disk I/O performance.)

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PS:

BTW, I'm not suggesting everyone jump into gig to the desktop, just that it should be carefully analyzed for your network, both now and perhaps for a couple years out; whether it makes sense to start to provide it. Also, just as with 10 to 100 transition, not all users are alike. I.e., some, depending on their work, are likely to benefit more from gig than other users.