Network managers investigating gigabit-speed switches, however, tend to place little weight on the specific speeds of gigabit switches. Standards support and management features are more important than the exact speed of a vendor's device, according to Fritz and others. The IEEE 802.3 standard for gigabit Ethernet over fiber and coaxial cable was approved this summer, standardizing gigabit Ethernet. Calif. For this reason, corporate network managers putting out a gigabit Ethernet RFP will want to make sure that products support IPX, Apple Computer Inc.'s AppleTalk, and whatever other protocols are running on their networks. Also, not all devices support Layer 3 routing, so enterprise managers planning to use gigabit switches in their backbones will want to make sure that OSPF, RIP, and RIP 2 are supported, according to McLean.
Management is also key, according to industry experts.
Although SMNP and at least some degree of RMON are checklist items in gigabit Ethernet switches, useful management software for these products is sorely lacking. This must be remedied because a misbehaving gigabit switch can wreak significantly greater havoc than one of its slower speed cousins. If you don't know about packet loss or collisions inside the switch, that could be extremely harmful because when it starts dropping packets it's going to drop a lot of them. New and old Besides all the technological choices facing managers interested in deploying gigabit Ethernet, there is also a vast array of vendors from which to choose. On the one hand, smaller vendors can better partner with IS departments to work out to assist them with details of their network plans.