introducing fast path technology
the need for speed
With today’s ever increasing use of electronic media, along comes the ever increasing traffic
on your network. Faster PC’s, digital color scanners, high speed color laser printers, digital
cameras, PDA’s (Personal Digital Assistants), IP telephones, and video conferencing have
opened up a whole new world of electronic communication. No longer is email restricted to
simple, short text messages. Today’s electronic mail messages usually include embedded color
graphics, attachments such as color photos, video clips, color presentations, and more! Web
based applications with complex color graphics present intuitive, attention grabbing
applications. The old “shared whiteboard” has been replaced with full color application
sharing. Webinars complete with interactive audio/video are mainstream applications. All
this boils down to the need for speed in you network infrastructure.
The road to fast path
Hewlett-Packard has been a leader in providing affordable, high performance networking for
technology
fast path technology
white paper
hp procurve switch
4108gl bundle
many years. HP invented key elements of 10Base-T and introduced the first 10Base-T products
in February 1990 to enable widespread 10Mbps Ethernet networking over common Category
3 telephone wire. It then followed up with the invention in March 1994 of 100VG, the first
commercially available, robust, affordable, 100Mbps Ethernet technology. With the
development of full-duplex Ethernet switches came industry wide adoption of 100Base-T. HP
quickly became a leader in 10/100Base-T Ethernet switches.
In October 1999, anticipating the need for affordable higher bandwidth connections, HP once
again revolutionized the industry with the introduction of 1000Base-T, the first commercially
available gigabit Ethernet interface capable of using Category 5 copper cable. As a part of
this introduction and as an ease-of-use feature, HP contributed HP Auto-MDIX to the gigabit
standard to automatically sense and connect to either a straight-through cable or cross
connect cable. HP Auto-MDIX has also been implemented in HP’s latest 10/100 Ethernet
switches and has been licensed for use with 10/100 links to several other vendors as well.
In October 2000, HP introduced the HP Procurve switch 2300 series and 2500 series of
10/100 switches, the first fixed 10/100 Ethernet switches with the “Switch on a Chip”. The
“Switch on a Chip” technology in these switches is the first to integrate all the essential
electronics for switching Ethernet packets (including the traditional backplane) into a single
Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). This family of switches is still the fastest in its
class, providing full wire speed switching on all ports.
In addition to significantly reducing cost, HP’s high performance switches greatly ease the
complexity of today’s networks by greatly reducing the need for configuring complex software
based congestion control schemes. HP’s competitors solve the congestion control issue using
complex prioritization schemes to speed high priority traffic through the network. Since the
HP Procurve 2300 and 2500 series of switches can support full media speed, HP switches take
advantage of a fundamental axiom in congestion control or prioritization. The axiom states
that
if congestion does not exist, prioritization has no effect.
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