N.E.T. ANNOUNCES THE PROMINA 4000 ATM SWITCH SETTING A NEW INDUSTRY BENCHMARK FOR AVAILABILITY PERFORMANCE
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., February 3, 1997 - N.E.T. today announced the ProminaT 4000 ATM switch, a carrier edge-class switch that supports superior traffic management for service offerings including ATM, frame relay and circuit emulation. The N.E.T.T Promina ATM switch features critical design characteristics required for the carrier, network service provider (NSP) and internet service provider (ISP) environment: mission-critical availability, scalability, advanced-traffic management, and a unified-network management capability that integrates other key WAN elements. The N.E.T. Promina 4000 switch has a design objective to set a new industry benchmark of 99.9999 percent availability, representing an improvement ranging from 10x to 100x over current-generation ATM switches.
"The Promina 4000 switch represents a tremendous investment in ATM technology and multiservice applications expertise, and we are pleased to make this announcement as the ATM WAN market is beginning to come into its own," said Joe Francesconi, president and CEO, N.E.T. "As part of the Vista Architecture, we have designed an edge switch with an objective of `six nines of availability' - translating into a mere 32 seconds of downtime per year."
The Promina 4000 ATM switch is based on a scalable architecture with switching capacities as low as 622 Mb/s scaling to 10 Gb/s. The Promina 4000 switch will initially support T3/E3 and OC3/STM1 interfaces with plans for OC12 in the future.
The Promina 4000 architecture features a unique distributed-switch fabric that allows capacity to be upgraded incrementally without taking the switch out of service. This scalability has been achieved cost-effectively on a single-shelf system through the use of custom silicon designed by N.E.T. The modular design concept allows customers to "scale" feature options according to evolving network needs. The new switch is designed with redundancy options for the "hardened" carrier and NSP markets. It is also Network Equipment Building System (NEBS) - compliant. The architecture also supports a "hot-swap" capability that reduces downtime for network configuration changes or routine maintenance. This capability includes in-service system software upgrades, in-service switch capacity expansion and in-service port hardware expansion. Software changes can be downloaded remotely.
Advanced-traffic management that simultaneously achieves high statistical gain with high levels of service integrity sets the Promina 4000 design apart from today's ATM offerings. The switch takes into account the widely disparate characteristics of voice, data, video, LAN and frame traffic and efficiently transports multiple services in ATM form at 10 Gb/s. In order to provide fairness and service guarantees, the Promina 4000 switch is designed to provide granular traffic management on a per-virtual-circuit basis for as many as 256,000 simultaneous virtual circuits.
The Promina 4000 switch will offer CBR, UBR, VBR-rt, VBR-nrt and ABR(EFCI) with 16 distinct Quality of Service options. It will support both PNNI 1.0 and UNI 3.1 defined ATM protocols. Large capacity buffers and advanced queuing schemes support throughput with a number of features including per-virtual-circuit early-packet discard, fair-cell discard, traffic shaping and congestion indicators. Private Virtual Circuits (PVCs) soft PVCs and Switched Virtual Circuits will be supported.
Craft and ATM Forum-standard SNMP interfaces provide flexible local and remote monitoring and management options. Combined with N.E.T.'s new PanaVueT management platform, a comprehensive set of network management capabilities can be achieved including fault management, configuration, performance, accounting, and security functions. As part of the N.E.T. Vista Architecture, the PanaVue network management system provides fault correlation, diagnostics and other functionality integrating the management of the entire N.E.T. Promina ATM and IDNXr families of products.
The N.E.T. Promina 4000 ATM switch is planned for availabilty in the third quarter of 1997 and prices will start at $80,000. The Promina 4000 ATM switch will be available through N.E.T. and selected distributors on a worldwide basis.
N.E.T., headquartered in Redwood City, Calif., is a leading worldwide supplier of multiservice backbone networks used by enterprises and global carriers in more than 50 countries. N.E.T. multiservice WANs and ATM products integrate voice, data, and video traffic with ATM, frame relay, LAN internetworking and ISDN capabilities for today's mission-critical applications. The company is certified to the worldwide ISO 9001 standard for design, manufacturing and servicing. Join us at our worldwide web site: net.com for further information.
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N.E.T., Promina and PanaVue are trademarks, and IDNX and the N.E.T. logo are registered trademarks of Network Equipment Technologies, Inc. |
