I thought this interesting: Hub bubble, a story about Cabletron in the latest issue of Forbes, page 62.
"Recently it has become apparent that routers can be displaced by so-called Layer 3 switches. Unlike a router, which sorts snippets of data one at a time, a switch opens up the electronic equivalent of a fire hose between two computers and lets the data pour through. Layer 3 switches combine the speed of a switch with the intelligence of a router. Customers need that higher speed to support applications involving voice and video.
Layer 3 switches outperform ordinary routers because they contain their intelligence in hardware rather than software. Better yet, they cost less than routers. The price/performance advantage will translate into a sales boom in the layer 3 switch market, from $35 million in 1997, to $690 million this year, to $4.5 billion in 2002, according to the Dell'Oro Group, a market researcher in Portola Valley, Calif."
The layer 3 switch we're talking about here is the Smartswitch Router, which was referenced in the September 9 press release concerning the component that LSI supplied to Cabletron in five weeks time.
This appears to be a big market. Can anyone advise what the importance of all this is to LSI? |
