MURRAY HILL, N.J., Sept. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU - news) announced today that its new OptiStar(TM) EdgeSwitch was named the Grand Prize Winner of the Best of Show Award competition at this week's NetWorld+Interop 2000 show in Atlanta.
The Best of Show award and Grand Prize award are given by two industry-leading publications, CMP Media's Network Computing and InternetWeek, to the products viewed as the most innovative in their class. There were more than 300 entries in the competition.
``The Grand Prize Winner was chosen from among the 11 products already selected as winners for their technology categories,'' said Wayne Rash, managing editor/Technology for InternetWeek. Lucent's OptiStar EdgeSwitch earlier had been named Best of Show in the WAN Access & Remote Equipment category.
``We picked Lucent Technologies and the OptiStar EdgeSwitch because we believe it's the most innovative solution, truly the best of the best debuted at NetWorld+Interop 2000 Atlanta,'' added Rob Kohlhepp, lab director for Network Computing.
Designed for data centers and large enterprises, Lucent's OptiStar EdgeSwitch provides a way to deploy high-speed optics to the network edge -- dramatically increasing the capacity of wide area network (WAN) access. This small, cost-effective device can be used in existing local networks to provide optical backbone connectivity at speeds up to 2.5 gigabits per second (Gb/s). In addition, an upcoming feature on the EdgeSwitch will extend storage networking across the optical backbone by mapping Fibre Channel -- a networking protocol used for storage access -- to the Internet Protocol (IP) in an approach called ``Fibre Channel over IP.''
``Lucent has been building backbone networks that transmit information at the speed of light for some time. Until now, storage facilities and businesses have been unable to take full advantage of this capacity because they have been trapped behind low-speed access connections,'' said Tim Sullivan, general manager of Lucent's Optical Area Network group. ``The OptiStar EdgeSwitch breaks down these barriers, bringing service providers and enterprises another step closer to the promise of an all-optical network.''
Internet service providers (ISP), application service providers (ASP) and enterprises can use the OptiStar EdgeSwitch to more fully utilize the local area and storage networking resources in their data centers. The availability of higher bandwidth accelerates the delivery of new bandwidth-intensive network services, such as streaming media, content caching, data backup, data replication and storage on demand.
Optical area networking
The OptiStar EdgeSwitch is the latest addition to the OptiStar product family, which also includes server-based optical OC-12c and OC-48c network adapters and Fibre Channel storage adapters. By providing fast optical access and opening up the capacity at the end points of a network, OptiStar products enable the integration of the local area, storage area and wide area networks into a unified high performance optical area network.
About Lucent Technologies
Lucent's Bell Labs has garnered more than 2,500 patents in optical technology alone. And with approximately 7,000 systems installed worldwide, Lucent is the global leader in deploying DWDM technology. For more information about Lucent's Optical Networking Group, please visit its Web site at lucent-optical.com.
Lucent Technologies, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., USA, designs and delivers the systems, software, silicon and services for next-generation communications networks for service providers and enterprises. Backed by the research and development of Bell Labs, Lucent focuses on high-growth areas such as broadband and mobile Internet infrastructure; communications software; communications semiconductors and optoelectronics; Web-based enterprise solutions that link private and public networks; and professional network design and consulting services. For more information on Lucent Technologies, visit its Web site at lucent.com.
SOURCE: Lucent Technologies |
