Vax 6320 on Ebay

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Paul Koning wrote:
> FDDI and 100BaseT are the same speed given equally competent
> implementations. 

With 100BaseT using an MTU of 1500, and FDDI using an MTU of 4478?  I 
don't believe there's a standard for jumbo frames on 100Base-T.

>  Sridhar> That's not even talking about fault-tolerance.
> 
> Ethernet and FDDI both offer fault tolerance.  They do it in different
> ways, but they both can do it.
> 
> Having spent several years in the FDDI ANSI committee, I know all the
> "why FDDI is better" FUD.  It doesn't hold water.  And it certainly
> doesn't justify the absolutely mindboggling complexity of FDDI
> compared to Ethernet.

Take a bunch of SAS CDDI cards, plug Cat 5 into them, plug other end 
into concentrator.  Voila.  Done.  Where's Need to run it a couple miles 
down the road?  No problem.  Not everything has to be backbone dual 
counter-rotating rings with trees.

That, and now that the hardware is out of fashion, it's a lot cheaper.

I have some GigE and some FDDI running over fiber between buildings here 
at work, and the GigE's redundant failover capacity often takes special 
hardware ($$), and often doesn't work as well.

>  >> You can run IP over it, of course.  And then you could run iSCSI,
>  >> if you don't mind the slow performance.  But FDDI was obsolete
>  >> long before iSCSI came out. So an FDDI to SCSI converter would
>  >> have to be a proprietary hack.
> 
>  Sridhar> Obselete?  It's still very much used in places where fault
>  Sridhar> tolerance is important.
> 
> You're thinking about the U.S. Navy?  I heard from them a few years
> ago when they realized that FDDI was dead, dead, dead, and they had to
> look for alternatives, because new FDDI hardware could no longer be
> obtained anywhere.

It's all over IBM's internal network NOC's.  I seem to remember one of 
the larger ISP's fairly near here still using it in their NAP.  I could 
probably find out who, if necessary.

That, and this is classiccmp.  Old != obselete.

Peace...  Sridhar