Cabletron Systems bridges, switches manual Management of Standalones, Limitations of Standalones

The Workgroup Approach

Management of Standalones

As standalone devices became more complex, the need to control them became greater. The need to have some form of troubleshooting and control process in place for an eight-port repeater is minimal. In a repeated network where more than 200 users are connected to a single repeater, management capabilities are no longer luxuries, they are a necessity. The advent of standalone bridges, which required software configuration and monitoring, marked the introduction of management capabilities to the standalone devices.

While the most basic standalone devices were unable to support any management and control operations, networking hardware vendors such as Cabletron Systems began to incorporate management functions into their devices, making intelligent networking devices. The growth of networks and the control offered by these intelligent devices paved the way for the modular networking chassis, or hub. Standalones could handle the growing size of networks, but not always the growing complexity. The modular chassis allowed facility networks to support far greater numbers of users from a single location than was possible with standalone devices.

Limitations of Standalones

In time, the networking market broke into facilities that were small enough to use standalone networking devices and facilities that required the control and flexibility of the modular hub. As this trend continued, a gap widened between the low-cost, low-flexibility standalone devices and the more expensive, more flexible modular chassis. Facilities that had opted to use standalone devices were painting themselves into a corner. The standalone devices had no option for adding more users other than expanding the network. There were no options available for adding new networking technologies to the standalone devices, and any upgrade to the capabilities of the network would involve a costly, all-or-nothing replacement of all equipment.

At the same time, the limitations that nobody thought they would reach became very real threats to the continued growth of networks reliant on standalones. That old repeater rule, which Network Managers had been able to get around with clever tricks of physical layout, was looming on the horizon, and user counts continued to climb.

Standalones 3-3