Cabletron delivers its first routers
By Margaret Johnston
IDG News Service, 1/30/98
Cabletron Systems, Inc. has announced its first router products two weeks after buying a start-up company that supplied the technology for the networking devices.
Cabletron's SmartSwitch Routers give the company an opportunity to compete for business from Internet service providers and to pursue the multibillion-dollar next-generation LAN backbone market, the company said yesterday in announcing the products at ComNet '98. The new products also mean Cabletron will compete head on with Cisco Systems, Inc. in the high-end router market.
The addition of routers to its product portfolio brings Cabletron in line with Cisco and the other large networking companies Bay Networks, Inc. and 3Com Corp., which have had routers in their product offerings for years. Cabletron previously built networks relying on hubs and switches within its SmartSwitch family and based on its SecureFast strategy.
Cabletron already owned 25% of Yago Systems, Inc. when it paid $213 million earlier this month for the Sunnyvale, Calif., maker of Gigabit Ethernet routing switches capable of routing traffic based on application profiles.
Cabletron's SmartSwitch Routers are fast because they employ a chip created by Yago engineers that is designed to do routing tasks, said Glenn Gabriel Ben-Yosef, president of Clear Thinking Research, Inc. in Boston. "Things are run in the hardware at wire speed as opposed to in the software," Ben-Yosef said.
Prices for the two new SmartSwitch Routers, the SS6000 and the SS9000, begin at $499 per port for Fast Ethernet. They can run IP and IPX, have a capacity of 250,000 route entries and offer performance of 15 million to 30 million packet/sec, Cabletron said.
Cabletron is now beta testing SmartSwitch routers at four sites. The SS6000, with eight slots and up to 14 Gigabit Ethernet ports and 56 10/100 ports, will be available in the second quarter. The larger SS9000, with roughly double the capacity, is expected to begin shipping in June.
The company plans to integrate Yago technology into its existing product line and SecureFast switch services architecture in the second half of this year. |
