Networking: Making LAN Design More Intelligent

By Jim Metzler

April 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)

I am very excited about this new newspaper in general and about this new column on networking in particular. This column is intended to present a high-level view of the networking industry, both in terms of the new products and services being offered in the marketplace, as well as how IT organizations are, or are not, using these products and services. The ultimate goal, of course, is to explain what all of this means to you the reader.

I’ll start off with a level setting in terms of networking. By that I mean that I will use the first two columns to present a high-level discussion of where we have come over the last decade or so and identify some of the key network issues of today. With that goal in mind, a simple, but powerful, way to classify networks is whether or not they are a Local Area Network (LAN) or a Wide Area Network (WAN). This classification works reasonably well. For example, people often refer to a Storage Area Network (SAN). In virtually all cases, a SAN is a special case of a LAN. People also refer to a remote access network, which is a special case of a WAN. One area in which the classification tends to break down is in discussing a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN). I will discuss MANs in a future column, so for now let’s stick with the approach that a network is either a LAN or a WAN. Having accepted that classification scheme, I will use this column to discuss how LANs have evolved and will use the next column to discuss how WANs have evolved.  

As recently as a decade ago virtually all LANs were based on shared media. The use of shared media meant that any traffic on the LAN could interfere with all of the other traffic on the LAN—similar to what happens today on WiFi networks. That typically was not a problem when the utilization of the LAN was low. And utilization tended to be low for two key reasons. One reason was that not everybody had LAN connectivity. The second reason was that the predominant use of LANs at that time was for very simple print and file sharing of word documents. Very few people were shipping around large Powerpoint documents, and streaming media to the desktop was a concept, but not a reality.

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