Toward a Reliable Gigabit Network—an Upgrade of the Spring-8 Network

The SPring-8 controls network has maintained accelerator operations in high reliability and shown good performance during the past years. To cope with the increase of loads on the network due to faster data acquisition and the addition of equipment data, networking hardware has been installed in the last few years. The upgraded network replaces the original FDDI backbone and switches with mixed FDDI/gigabit ethernet and Layer-3 switches. It is necessary to keep the double ring topology for the FDDI and introduce link aggregation technology for the gigabit ethernet to maintain the full redundancy and bandwidth of the system. This paper will discuss the network performance of the gigabit ethernet including its latency and redundancy. We also discuss a future plan for the network including Quality-of-Service over the gigabit ethernet.