Network Infrastructure

For nearly twenty years , network infrastructure remained fairly static. In 1983, for instance, the first Sun-1 workstation shipped with 10 Mbit/second ethernet standard. In 1995, Sun's SPARCstation 20 workstation still shipped with a 10 Mbit/second ethernet interface. FDDI technology extended networking speeds to 100 Mbit/second, but this high speed technology was typically reserved for backbone networks connecting large servers. In November of 1995, Sun started shipping 100 Mbit/second fast ethernet as standard on its UltraSPARC-1 workstations. This trend was quickly endorsed by the volume PC marketplace and in 1997, more than 50% of the ethernet network interface cards shipped by all vendors were capable of running at 100 Mbit/second. In 1998, all the major network equipment vendors are shipping 1,000 Mbit/second gigabit ethernet switches. During the last three years, most network managers have started to change over from a shared hub-based infrastructure to switched networking devices supporting full channel speeds on each point-to-point link.