Switches, ATM to top
N+I bill
Packet Engines, NBase, Berkeley
Networks, others ready networking
hardware
By PC Week Staff
04.27.98
Network administrators at
NetWorld+Interop next week
will find an emphasis on
routing switches for the LAN
and on ATM for wide-area
connectivity.
"The routing switch stuff was
hot and exciting a year ago,
but only now are these
products shipping, so the
show will have real hardware,"
said David Passmore, an
analyst at NetReference Inc.,
in Sterling, Va.
At the Las Vegas show, Packet Engines Inc. will
unveil its first high-end routing switches.
The PowerRail 5200 will support 25 Gigabit
Ethernet or 240 Fast Ethernet ports with a
capacity of 53G bps. Available now, the switch is
priced at $540 per port for Fast Ethernet and
$3,495 per port for Gigabit Ethernet.
A second model, the PowerRail 2200, offers 10
Gigabit or 100 Fast Ethernet ports with 22G-bps
capacity. Due in the third quarter, it costs $550
per Fast Ethernet port and $3,595 per Gigabit
port.
For the workgroup, the PowerRail 1000 will
provide two Gigabit or 10 Fast Ethernet ports.
Also due in the third quarter, it will cost $250 per
port for Fast Ethernet and $1,750 per port for
Gigabit Ethernet, said Packet Engines officials in
Spokane, Wash.
NBase Communications Inc. will also debut a
routing switch, the six-slot MegaSwitch MS7500
HD, which can be configured with 120
10/100M-bps ports or 12 Gigabit Ethernet ports.
Uplinks include Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet,
FDDI and ATM (asynchronous transfer mode),
said officials of NBase, in Chatsworth, Calif. The
switch will cost $349 per port for Fast Ethernet.
Gigabit Ethernet pricing has not been set.
Next-generation router startup Berkeley Networks
Inc. will add a new firewall accelerator to its
Windows NT-based exponeNT application-aware
switching system. The Firewall Accelerator Agent
allows the switch to run Check Point Software
Technologies Ltd.'s Firewall-1 TCP/IP firewall at
"gigabit speeds on every port," according to
Donal Byrne, vice president of marketing at
Berkeley, in Milpitas, Calif.
To achieve such high throughput, the agent
integrates Check Point's firewall with the switch's
high-performance application-specific integrated
circuits. The agent, due in July, costs $10,000 for
the first line card in the switch; agents for
additional line cards are $5,000.
Linksys Corp. will unveil new Fast Ethernet
products, including the EtherFast 10/100M-bps
Auto-Sensing Hubs in eight-port and 16-port
desktop models and 16-port and 24-port
rack-mount models, with street prices ranging
from $300 to $650.
EtherFast 100BaseTX Hubs will come in five-,
eight- or 16-port desktop models and 16- and
24-port rack-mount models with street prices
from $99 to $479. The StackPro 100 24-Port
Rackmount Hub stacks up to four 24-port hubs
and has a street price of $559, said officials in
Sunnyvale, Calif.
Users seeking high bandwidth for the wide area
will find ATM and multiservice access
concentrators from General Datacomm Inc., in
Middlebury, Conn.
The AT-1000 ATM Network Terminating Unit
allows carriers to provision ATM services to
customer premises at speeds from 1.5M bps to
155M bps. The unit allows carriers to establish
policies for cell-switched traffic at the customer's
site and perform monitoring and diagnostics at
the point of demarcation between the customer's
network and the service provider's network.
Available next month, the AT-1000 is priced
starting at $5,500.
GDC's new Multiservice Access Concentrators
extend ATM's WAN reach out to branch offices
with low-speed, lower-cost ATM connections.
The MAC-100 provides a T-1/E-1 ATM interface
on the WAN side and Ethernet or frame relay
interfaces on the customer side, along with an
optional LAN Emulation client. The MAC-200 and
MAC-300 consolidate LAN, IP, voice and frame
relay traffic from branch offices onto a frame
relay backbone. All three GDC products will be
available next month starting at $1,795.
Also on the ATM front, Concord Communications
Inc., of Marlboro, Mass., will add a new ATM
option to its network performance and reporting
software. Network Health-ATM monitors
backbone performance and generates reports on
ATM network utilization. Able to monitor traffic
generated by a variety of ATM equipment, it will
ship in June for $3,000.
Reported by Scott Berinato, Paula Musich,
Carmen Nobel and John Rendleman. |
