This White Paper explores the critical requirements for high-speed networks and how a variety of alternatives meet those needs. Ever since computers started arriving on desktops, we've hungered for speed. Faster disk drives. All in an effort to access information faster.
Computers are faster.
Over the same period, software applications have grown in sophistication and information content to the point that typical information items such as a business letter or presentation graphic require more than 100 times more storage space than items we used ten years ago. Network speed is now becoming a critical bottleneck in a variety of key business application areas including database management, imaging, computer-aided design, desktop publishing and network printing. Emerging applications will cause even more strain on networks over the next few years. On a typical Ethernet or Token-Ring network, it can take as long as twenty seconds to retrieve that one page, depending on network traffic. Retrieving multiple-page documents can take a minute or more.