it allows. As companies don't have to upgrade or change fundamental parts of their IT infra- structure, the business case becomes easier to justify. The effort in the 10 Gbps Ethernet dimension is 30. Jayant Kadambi, Ian Crawford, and Mohan Kalkunte, Gigabit Ethernet: Migrating to High-Bandwidth LANs (Upper-Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1998). 31. Radia Perlman, Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols, 2nd ed. (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1999). Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. THE EVOLUTION OF NETWORK TECHNOLOGY: DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING AND THE CONVERGENCE OF NETWORKS 18 NETWORK PROCESSORS further compounded by the work done by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) and the 10 Gigabit Ethernet Alliance. More information about these groups can be found in the Appendix III, "Standardization Efforts in Network Processing." STORAGE NETWORKS With the establishment of the client-server computing model, IT managers realized that in order to cope with application growth and the demand for functionality on behalf of users, they would need to be able to attach storage space and devices onto an existing IT hierarchy. These devices include hard disks, tape drives, and SO on. This storage attachment should enable several computer systems to gain access to the storage reliably and in a modular fashion. In order to do that, they had to adopt either the direct attachment model or the network-attached storage (NAS) model. The direct attachment model meant that storage devices would hang from a server using the stan- dard Small Computer System Interface (SCSI), which is currently at its Ultra3 level of iteration and is able to sustain a throughput of 160 Mbytes/sec. The NAS model required that the disk arrays and storage devices connect directly onto a traditional LAN using network adapters, suc