Fast and Furious Ethernet

Although vendors' gross revenue has been flat, or even on the decline, the number of Gigabit Ethernet (1000Base) ports they have shipped has actually climbed steadily during the past few quarters, according to

Seamus Crehan, an analyst with market research consulting firm Dell'Oro Group, Redwood City, Calif. That apparent contradiction is really the heart of the good news for VARs, because it means the price of

1000Base hardware has been rapidly declining as larger vendors have entered the market, bringing with them economies of scale in manufacturing. VARBusiness' State of Technology research findings reveal more than two-thirds of solution providers surveyed are currently engaged in or plan to resell, recommend, influence, deploy, service and/or support Ethernet technology/protocols for desktops or servers among the various BaseT-levels in the next 12 months.

"I think the affordability of Gigabit Ethernet is certainly gettin' there,'" says Phil Mogavero, president and CEO of Data Systems Worldwide, a Woodland Hills, Calif.-based solution provider.

"The implementations that we have done have not been dramatically expensive, compared with the ultimate ROI that [customers are getting," agrees Steven Miller, president and CEO of BTI InfoSystems Services, a systems integrator based in Emeryville, Calif.

Likewise, big-name computer manufacturers have climbed aboard the 1000Base bandwagon. Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard all now offer integrated Gigabit Ethernet as a standard feature of their higher-end desktops. And, according to

Dell'Oro's Crehan, the party is just beginning. He expects that, compared with 2001 numbers, annual 1000Base port shipments will increase approximately tenfold by 2006, from roughly 4.9 million in 2001 to more than 50 million five years later. VARBusiness research shows that, on average, for 2002, more than three in five Ethernet nodes for desktop and server equipment are deployed at the 100Base-T level; fewer than one in five nodes is currently deployed at the Gigabit Ethernet level.

For VARs, the good news is that their learning curve for successfully implementing the new technology is essentially flat: If you can do 100Base-T installations, you already have the skills necessary to make 1000Base-T networks hum.

Ethernet Is Ethernet

Both 100Base-T and 1000- Base-T should run successfully over the same Category 5 cable most of your customers already have in place, but there is a distinction. While 100Base-T uses two pairs of cable per connection,one to transmit and one to receive,Gigabit Ethernet uses four pairs, transmitting and receiving on all four.

That means existing cabling installations can service only half as many 1000Base-T nodes as they did 100Base-T stations. Even so, if sufficient redundancy was designed into the physical plant to cope with the growth in staff many of your customers were expecting before the stock-market bubble burst,growth they probably won't actually experience anytime soon,then recabling might not be necessary.

That reduces your integration problems considerably, although you may find that doing a thorough job involves a little more than merely swapping out 100Base-T or 100Base-TX hubs, switches, routers and NICs for their 1000Base equivalents. You will, of course, want to test your clients' cable plants to be sure that near- and far-end crosstalk, as well as return loss and equal-level-far-end crosstalk, meet the minimum requirements of the ANSI/TIA/EIA TSB67 and ANSI/TIA/EIA TSB95 standards, respectively. "It depends on the application and the distance," Mogavero notes.

The even better news is that you probably won't need new cable-testing equipment. While cable run lengths, electrical noise and crosstalk all have a significantly greater impact on performance with Gigabit Ethernet than they did with Fast Ethernet, your existing 100Base-T cable testers can perform all the necessary certification tests. Of course, you'll have to upgrade older Category 5 wall outlets to Category 5 enhanced jacks (Cat 5e) and modify any cable cross-connects to Cat 5e-compliant interconnects to use your customers' existing physical plants, but that's still a lot less work for you,and considerably less expense for your clients,than pulling fiber would entail.

"A lot of [our customers are a little reticent to dig up the grounds and run fiber," BTI's Miller explains.

Naturally, you'll also need to replace the Fast Ethernet NIC drivers in your clients' servers and desktops with gigabit versions. Fortunately, there are 1000Base-T and 1000Base-TX drivers available for many desktop and server OSs,though Windows 95 is not among them.

Making the Sale

Of course, you're going to need a more convincing rationale than, "At least you won't have to replace your cables," if you're going to sell your clients on upgrading to Gigabit Ethernet. After all, your relationship with them is that of a provider of economically sound solutions to their business-computing needs, rather than someone who just sells them boxes.

So, the first question your customers are going to ask is, "Why do I need Gigabit Ethernet?" One possible answer, Data Systems' Mogavero suggests, is: "The cost of human capital is significantly greater than the cost of deploying gigabit to the desktop."

"Where we're really seeing it is in cities, counties, agencies and hospitals,particularly campused environments," BTI's Miller adds. "Their focus is on moving large amounts of data, so they really need to have that huge pipe."

The Need For Speed

The three most common implementations for Gigabit Ethernet are voice-over-IP, desktop backups over the network and server-based desktop applications, especially transactional database queries. Also heavily involved are standard productivity applications in environments where they are configured to run from a server, rather than from local hard drives. The performance delta is particularly obvious when the desktop machines are late-model, high-speed boxes equipped with fast CPUs, RAM and video subsystems.

Even for smaller enterprises, the savings of ditching expensive, disk-constrained PBXs in favor of integrated telephony are compelling, and the prospect of eliminating some percentage of long-distance charges via VoIP is still more enticing.

Need another selling point? Then consider this finding: In a recent set of tests conducted by Syracuse, N.Y.-based CSA Research, a 1000Base-T desktop connection increased the performance of a Pentium 4 client conducting a series of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database queries as much as 47 percent over a Fast Ethernet link.

In heavily database-driven business environments, such as accounting, CRM and ERP, that increase in speed could easily translate to nontrivial prospective increases in efficiency, thus potentially enabling your clients to service more of their customers without bumping up employee head counts.

But there's a caveat: In the CSA test, slower, Pentium III-based desktops displayed much smaller improvements in performance than their faster cousins. Their slower CPU and internal bus speeds simply weren't able to take full advantage of the bigger data pipe. Consequently, for customers who don't plan to purchase a raft of new desktops in the immediate future,which, based on current market trends probably includes most of your clients,your best strategy may be to advocate a phased approach to upgrading their networks to gigabit speeds.

"I think that, as the next wave of refresh takes place, more and more companies are going to start to consider [gigabit speeds," BTI's Miller says.

Half a Measure Is Better Than None

Many current-generation Fast Ethernet switches are equipped with Gigabit Ethernet uplink ports. That means it's possible for you to offer your 100Base-T customers real benefits from upgrading the NICs in their servers and replacing Category 5 cross-connects with Cat 5e interconnects to transition their internal backbones from 100 Mbps to gigabit speed. In addition, given how inexpensive Fast Ethernet switches have become, it may make sense to upgrade older switches that don't include gigabit uplink ports so that your clients can take full advantage of the 100Base-T NICs in their existing desktops.

"If you start looking at the value you can get out of implementing quality of service and the security that's part of Layer 3, ASIC-based switch technology, [your customers are going to see great benefit," Data Systems' Mogavero says.

While you're at it, you might want to look at how many of your customers are using ATM on their campus backbones. If they're expanding their network,and, despite the recession, some organizations are,you may want to recommend they replace that ATM backbone with Gigabit Ethernet, because the cost differential between the two technologies may be enough to pay for pulling new cable. And eliminating the protocol conversion ATM requires will reduce your clients' total cost of ownership.

Not a Panacea

Switching to Gigabit Ethernet isn't a universal panacea, by any means. That's especially true of environments that rely on outdated Category 3 cabling systems and older, slower computers. But where it makes sense, it can make a great deal of sense.

"If you look at it as a solution, and measure it at the beginning and the end, you'll find there's huge productivity to be gained," Mogavero says.

In a nutshell, the faster your customers' desktop machines are and the more heavily their computing environment leans toward transactional databases, the more likely they are to benefit from an upgrade to Gigabit Ethernet. The newer their cable plants, the less expensive that upgrade will be. With the price of 1000Base-T NICs and switches falling rapidly, the changeover can be swift and relatively painless for both of you. And, because only the lowest layers of the ISO stack are affected, the only difference end users will see is improved performance.

Miller sums it up this way: "It's really just a minor component to bring it to the next level, to be ready for such things as rich-data flows, voice-over-IP, video,those kinds of things."

And that's good news for everyone.