FDDI or Gigabyte Ethernet?

[DirtylilTechBoy]

Hello,

I am building a server farm and planned to use a gigabyte ethernet. However, my friend, who is in training to be Cisco certified has said that I should use a Fiber Optic Token Ring network and that since the Fiber is so much more stable, that I would be better of with a 100 meg Optical network rather than a Gigabyte Cat5 network. Any advice?

 

[bolomite]

It depends on your budget and also on how mission-critical your setup is. FDDI is pricey, but the redundancy it provides is nice.

 

[Kell]

Another thing to consider is that some Gigabit (you probably mean Gigabit, not Gigabyte ) NICs offer adapter teaming and hot-swap PCI features to give you some additional redundancy. Intel server adapters are renowned for this.

 

[L3Guy]

FDDI was a great technology. It was fast, stable, fault tolerant and prohibitively expensive.
Its Still expensive, more than 10 years after its introduction and at the end of its useful life.
Its also Very quickly. While most of the things that gave it issues have faded, it still needs specialized knowledge to avoid pitfalls.

There are other ways to archive what FDDI did so very well.
If its fiber you value, Gigabit SX is really very common, and for fiber, cost effective.
on the other hand, Many admins like copper in server rooms, due to its easier perceived handling, bend radius, etc.
If its redundancy, dual 100 Mb Ethernet NIC will give you about the same throughput and at least as good redundancy.

I am not criticizing your friend. The training tends to lag the industry by a bit, and without experience, its easy to buy
the class?s outdated views on certain technologies. FDDI was dead about 2 to 3 years ago, with switches for Ethernet becoming inexpensive, gig E over fiber and inexpensive 100 base F common and useful. Also, the translation issues are real, its half duplex, and you must be very careful what can be powered down on a ring.

My advice is to tell your friend you do not have a pole long enough in 2001 to touch FDDI. Sorry for the harsh assessment.

Just my two cents.

Doug

 

[porkchop]

Token Ring is a good idea, and a great technology for many enviornments.

However, since it didn't catch on despite IBM's weight, the technology was finally sold to Cisco (it was cisco, right?) several months ago. I heard they were letting the technology die. 16mbit hardware is still in use, 100mbit hardware was made, but I was unaware that 1000mbit was anything but spec'd out.

Anyhow, point is, I don't know if anyone's producing TR hardware anymore. If you get it, it'll be unsupported in short order. If Cisco has chosen to keep life in TR, I dont think theres much reason to believe Cisco can turn it into an accepted option when IBM coulden't.
Pkcp

 

[ktwebb]

They are not talking about traditional cat5 or coax token ring networks. They are referring to Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI). A fiber medium technology that uses timed token passing with a dual ring topology.