On Mon, 3 Nov 1997, Mike Gibbs wrote:
According to the techs at MFS, the NEW design is five gigaswitches plugging into one gigaswitch. No one will be plugged into this switch, that is giga6. The problem accuring at Mae-East now sits on its hardware. With this design, giga6 must switch more traffic then its backplane can handle. This causes packet-loss, and annoyed customers. DECs switches seem to have a limited spanning-tree, so they can't have two gigaswitchs for bridges and split the load between them. Again, this is what I got from talking to their techs. Supposedly DEC and MFS are working these problems out.
I agree it is a bad design, but it should be able to handle the traffic. I check the DEC www page, and they say the backplane can handle 3.6 gb/s. -Nathan