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Standalones 3-3
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.