Thousands of hosts on a gigabit LAN, maybe not

[johnl at iecc.com (John R. Levine)]

> Also, do you need line rate forwarding? Having 1,000 devices with 1Gb 
> uplinks doesn't necessarily mean that full throughput is required... the 
> clustering and the applications may be sporadic and bursty?

It's definitely sporadic and bursty.  There's another network for high 
speed traffic among the nodes.  The Ethernet is for stuff like program 
loading from NFS servers..

> And... what support do you need? Just one spare on the shelf or full 
> vendor support on every switch?

Spare on the shelf, definitely.

R's,
John