February 1999

Network Growth Challenge: The Bandwidth Bottleneck

Chances are your campus backbone traffic is growing like crazy. If your network is like most others, the traffic load is increasing by 40 to 50 percent each year. because your file servers and web servers are now likely to be on a centralized server farm, most of this LAN traffic must be processed by your conventional backbone router. And, to compound the problem, the explosive growth in your WAN and Internet access traffic also places a hugh load on the router.

General purpose routers are still the best choice for handling your wide-area traffic. Granted, you may have struggled initially to get your network stable, but, after a big investment in time and money, the early difficulties have probably been overcome. But now you're facing a new problem. Your conventional router has become a bandwidth bottleneck. You want to upgrade to Fast Ethernet, but the router cards are very expensive,and because there are only a few ports on each card, you would need more router slots, which may not be available. If you do find room for the Fast Ethernet cards, you'll need to take down the network to perform the upgrade, and even then, the router's limited processing power still makes it the network bottleneck.

FlowWise Networks

Self-Configuring Router Accelerator Eliminates the Bandwidth Botleneck

The FlowWise IMS 1600 accelerates your existing router to eliminate the bandwidth bottleneck. With it's unique AutoRoute feature, the IMS 1600 actually configures itself! You don't even need to assign an IP address. It automates it's own configuration, and completely eliminates the need for any reconfiguration of your existing equipment.

AutoRoute works with all conventional routers, including those from Cisco Systems, Bay Networks, 3Com, and any others you may be using. Your existing routers can continue to operate with the protocols you already have configured, including RIP or OSPF. They can even be running Cisco's IGRP or EIGRP.

Using the IMS 1600, the intensive local traffic is shifted away from your existing router as shown in the diagram above. The IMS 1600 automatically learns the IP routing configuration by observing the data that passes transparently through it. Once the configuration is learned, the IMS 1600 takes over the routing of local traffic, while the conventional router continues to handle the WAN traffic. The configuration of the conventional router is unchanged. In fact, it continues to forward data during the installation of the IMS 1600.

For additional information on these products contact us.