Laying the pipeline

Five tips for smooth deployments:

1. Stick to one vendor's switch — and even to one manufacturing lot number

if you can — to avoid interoperability problems and to guarantee end-to-end

effectiveness of management features such as quality of service.

2. Use single-mode fiber cable between switches whenever possible and

limit the use of Gigabit Ethernet on copper cable to server farms, where

cable runs are shorter.

3. Test Gigabit Ethernet switches with Gigabit Ethernet network interface

cards (NICs) to ensure that they work well together.

4. When possible, use a Gigabit Ethernet NIC in a server to save on

the cost of using a Gigabit Ethernet switch.

5. When setting network traffic priorities, use standard rather than

proprietary methods to ensure that the settings will work if other vendors'

equipment is added in the future.