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COMPUTING

Gigabit Ethernet meets Van Gogh at Christie's

September 9, 1999
Web posted at: 12:54 p.m. EDT (1654 GMT)

by Carolyn A. April

From...
InfoWorld

(IDG) -- Call it "high art meets high-tech." Christie's auction house, famous for fetching $82.5 million for Van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet," this spring added a pricey, state-of-the-art Gigabit Ethernet backbone network to its stable of fine portraits and antiques.

According to networking analysts, Gigabit Ethernet networks are rare because the technology is immature and the switching equipment is expensive.
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Christie's $850,000 network project took root last year when the 233-year-old firm outgrew its auction rooms and exhibition halls and relocated its headquarters from New York's Park Avenue to a completely unwired site in Rockefeller Center.

The new building -- a renovated, five-floor former parking garage -- gave Christie's IT team a rare opportunity to start over again. They ran with it.

"We wanted to wire for the future, and do it once for the long-term," says Steven Russell, CIO at Christie's. "Some of the things we were ordering were very new, but we wanted cutting edge."

Because the technology was so new, Christie's outsourced the project. The IT group considered Cisco Systems, Bay Networks, and 3Com before choosing 3Com's CoreBuilder 9000.

"We wanted the biggest pipe we could have," says Brian Charkowick, vice president of IT and technical services at Christie's. "The hardware was so new that we couldn't do the install ourselves. [Outsourcing was] a little more pricey, but well worth it."

Now the challenge is finding administrators to maintain and support this high-end infrastructure.

"I'm trying to hire desperately. Finding 3Com engineers is hard to do right now. Most people are Cisco [engineers]," Charkowick says.

Still, Christie's has no regrets.

Launched in April, the 1,000-node network is anchored by two redundant 3Com CoreBuilder 9000 switches interconnected by dual 1Gbps Gigabit Ethernet-trunked connections. For additional redundancy, the two central switches each have two Gigabit Ethernet-trunked connections to three more CoreBuilder 9000 switches.

Other features include 10/100Mbps links from desktops to servers, eight 3Com Super Stack 2 3900 switches, and two redundant Gigabit Ethernet links to two 3Com CoreBuilder 3500 Layer 3 switches that support virtual LANs (VLANs), which enable administrators to segment network traffic between departments or floors.

Russell's main objectives in deploying this high-end infrastructure was to speed network performance and to ensure redundancy.

Specifically, he was looking to streamline the flow of Christie's digital imaging studio's file traffic. The imaging studio creates and distributes high-resolution digital photographs of art and other items for catalogs Christie's produces to promote its New York auctions. File sizes are hefty, at an average of 12MB to 96MB, and require quick transfer between users, Russell says.

Another major benefit is a unified data center. Before, the company's Windows NT- and Unix-based data center and 100 users were at a separate Upper East Side site. Christie's bandwidth-intensive digital imaging group was also on its own LAN. The relocation allowed Christie's to centralize its legion of New York-based users on one LAN. Also, the digital imaging group can access the main network, while using virtual LANs to segment large-file traffic and avoid causing bottlenecks. The end result is happier, more efficient workers.

"We rely on bandwidth extensively, and we are averaging between 6MB to 10MB per second -- this means so much to our productivity," says Noah Durham, digital imaging manager at Christie's.

Carolyn A. April is InfoWorld's Deputy News Editor.


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