We are designing a ship based combat management system which is networked with ship borne equipment on a dual redundant Gigabit ethernet bus. I am looking for a Network Interface Card(NIC) (VME back plane based) which provides the Gbit bus I/O capability at each processing node. This NIC (VME based) is expected to provide dual bus redundancy on the network independent to the application s/w running on the CPU of the node. This NIC (VME based) would also be capable of handling network latency, data bus, redundancy etc., would it be necessary to use the same NIC in all the nodes or such cards are available from multiple vendors based on open standards and are interchangeable.