Switched Ethernet beats sneakernet

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March 15, 1996 by Bill Rossi

Ever walked into your production department at deadline time and seen a roomful of employees with their feet on their desks, "busy" working? When too many people attempt to transfer large files simultaneously over an inadequately configured network, the system bottlenecks, bringing activity on the network--and in the office--to a standstill.

This fairly common problem is the result of years of klunky attempts to link together Macintoshes, PCs, printers and other peripherals without regard to the effect on network throughput. When such a system experiences high levels of network utilization, bottlenecks occur. Occasionally, the system crashes and valuable data can be lost. More often, however, these bottlenecks simply make the network--and your employees--less productive.

Sneaky solution

Employees typically solve this problem through sneakernet--techie slang for downloading a file from the server to some type of removable media (such as an optical tape or a removable hard disk), bypassing the network and instead walking a file from the server to the desktop. While this is certainly a low-tech, inexpensive solution, it does have drawbacks. According to Tom Alonzo, partner, Cohesion, Inc., a Littleton, Massachusetts-based network consulting firm for the electronic publishing and pre-press industries, disks and tapes are often left unlabeled and can easily get lost in a chaotic and hectic production department. Moreover, sneakernet eliminates one of the major advantages of having a network: the ability to execute and track revisions to a file quickly.

Switching gears

To achieve high network utilization within the electronic publishing arena where multiple users need to access a single machine, server or imagesetter, there is an easy solution known as Ethernet switching. Switched Ethernet offers dedicated bandwidth to each local area network (LAN) node, allowing for greater LAN efficiency and providing an affordable upgrade path from shared 10 Megabits per second (Mbps).

Ethernet switches create a dedicated Ethernet channel between the sender and receiver of each individual data packet. If someone in the production department wants to send an image file from their Mac to the server, the Ethernet switch looks up the server's address and associated switch port and creates a virtual pipeline directly to the server, thereby avoiding the other devices on the network. The data packet can move at the maximum data rate without affecting network utilization on other parts of the network.

Switched Ethernet has a number of benefits for publishing environments. Many Ethernet switches provide both 10 Mbps ports for direct connection to a workstation or router, and 100 Mbps ports that provide high-speed links to servers, RIPs and other critical peripherals. Ethernet switches are platform independent, so they can be supported by your current publishing environment, whether that consists of Macs, PCs or other devices.

More important, with Ethernet switches, you can preserve your investment in existing hardware, 10BaseT network interface cards, cabling and software. Finally, switches physically centralize operations and improve system administration and archiving.

Case and point

Clipper, a direct-mail magazine published in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, produces approximately 250 full-color pages a week. Each page holds between 10 and 40 megabytes of data. Clipper's environment used to consist of 15 client Macintosh computers, a file server, three Macintosh imaging workstations, a color copier and three laser printers.

"Congestion was pretty evident on a daily basis," says Art Larsen, systems director, Clipper Magazine, Inc. "Whenever a large image file was transferred across the network, the system slowed. If someone decided to save the day's work to a tape drive, the whole network came to a standstill."

Larsen needed a solution, so he added a Cisco Systems Catalyst 1700 Ethernet switch to the network, connecting client Macs, imaging workstations and laser printers to the 10 Mbps ports, and the server and color copier to the switch's 100 Mbps Ethernet ports. The system worked so well that Clipper has since expanded to 35 client Macs and added an additional switch with no discernible degradation in performance.

"The use of a private Ethernet connection to each client is vastly more efficient," says Larsen. "We experience network slowdowns only when everyone accesses the server--and even then, there's still more than adequate bandwidth for printing."

Clipper uses switched Ethernet to eliminate network bottlenecks and improve performance. Ethernet switches can be implemented at a cost well below what you would expect. For example, you can buy a switch from Cisco that contains 27 ports for just over $4,000. So, tell your employees to hang up their sneakers and transfer their files. With Ethernet switching, there is no excuse.