Frame Relay Questions

[crimsontide]

Looking to setup a frame relay network for my job. It will include about 30 sites. All the sales people I talk with feed me all the benefits with few downsides. Anyone know of serious drawbacks?

We are currently running all Novell Netware 5.1 servers (3 total) and use them mainly for file sharing and printing. We'd probably stay with those servers due to reliablity (they go 100's of days w/ no reboots) and lisensing cost. As far as mail goes: Groupwise or Exchange?

 

[dirtboy]

Frame connections are quite good. There really aren't too many downsides and should work quite well for your setup. At the last place I worked, we setup a frame network to about 15 locations. We were running a mix NT & Novell network.

 

[Networker]

What type of frame relay network are you setting up? Full mesh, partial mesh, or hub and spoke. Downside to frame relay.... depends on what your CIR is. If you have a CIR of 16k then everything you burst above 16k is a DE packet. If you set up a hub and spoke and you oversubscribe, you are going to have some serious latency. Just make sure you are comfortable with the level of CIR you purchased.

 

[CTR]

Voice of experience:
Go with Groupwise. The client is SO much better than exchange. And you can run the server components on your existing hardware if you want. Plus all of the administration is done through the same NWADMN32 tool that you are using anyway. And it comes bundled with POP3 and Web-access server modules. Totally scalable in a WAN environment, much more so than exchange.

Frame relay is pretty good, too. But just be aware that you will not get anything above your CIR in most cases. FR providers are pretty much oversubscribed these days, no matter what they tell you. And be sure to install RMON probes at each of your sites so you can monitor your actual bandwidth. Very often providers will give you less than your CIR and not tell you. But if you show them your RMON data, they will discount your bill. Again, this is from personal experience. What kind of CIR are you talking about? Remember that NDS needs some breathing room!

 

[Xanathar]

From my Experience I would say stay away from groupwise, while it is easier to administer I have had nothing but issues with the clients recently and their web based access is nearly impossible to access securly throu a firewall. The Exchange Client is horrible (HOWEVER) no one ever uses it anymore as outlook is now the defacto client.

One point for frame relay... Are you running IPX or IP for your primary protocol with Novell, also are you running any specific server side apps. Frame relay has a slighlty higher latency then a clear channel >perfectly fine for IP< but if you are jumping over muliple switches in the cloud I have had IPX scream and hollar at me (*only with certain applications which were time latency sensitive)

You *may* want to call in a contractor to set everything up if you have not worked with this before, remember that using and administrating are completely different from installing, troubleshooting and tweaking.