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To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (3198)	8/12/1999 12:52:00 PM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14638

Broadcom plans to release StrataSwitch in volume in the fourth quarter. The move means that Broadcom Customers, such as Cabletron, Cisco, Nortel Networks and 3Com, should be unveiling Layer 3- and Layer 4-aware stackable and workgroup switches next year at roughly half the cost of current offerings. networkworld.com Broadcom unveils chips for QoS-enabled switches By Jim Duffy Network World Fusion, 08/12/99 IRVINE, CALIF. - Users should see Layer 3 switches on the market next year costing less than $70 per port. Sound laughable? Not to chip maker Broadcom, which this week is announcing a multilayer switch-on-a-chip that will bring Layer 3 and Layer 4 quality-of-service (QoS) and voice/data convergence capabilities to stackable workgroup switches. Currently, low-cost Ethernet switches are predominantly Layer 2 forwarding engines with limited QoS features, such as 802.1p and 802.1Q support for priority and virtual LAN membership, and Internet Group Management Protocol snooping for multicast grouping. The current switches typically cost around $100 per port for 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet. But Broadcom's StrataSwitch chipset will let vendors deliver stackable switches that can read Layer 3 address and Layer 4 port and socket information at a price of $50 to $70 per 10/100 port, according to Broadcom. Layer 3- and Layer 4-aware devices are usually routers or routing switches that cost hundreds of dollars - some just under $1,000 - per port. Broadcom plans to release StrataSwitch in volume in the fourth quarter. The move means that Broadcom customers, such as Cabletron, Cisco, Nortel Networks and 3Com, should be unveiling Layer 3- and Layer 4-aware stackable and workgroup switches next year at roughly half the cost of current offerings. "The switch price is where we were forecasting it to go," says Esmeralda Silva, LAN analyst at International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass. "The only way switch prices could get there is by doing more integration. This is for a full-featured switch that allows you to start to build a nice QoS network at the right price." "With the price drops we've seen in 10/100, I think Broadcom might be right in" the $50 to $70 per-port range, says Mike McConnell, an analyst at Infonetics Research in San Jose. Broadcom is not alone. Competitors such as MMC Networks and Maker Communications are spinning network processors that integrate more and more multiservice features. This trend is helping to drive switch prices down for end users because they need less hardware or software to get the features they need. MMC, for example, in June unveiled Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet chipsets that incorporate packet classification capabilities for policy-based networking. Ostensibly, the devices will enable workgroup and enterprise backbone switches to look deep enough into packets for security and QoS policies. StrataSwitch essentially works the same way. Broadcom's Content-Aware packet classification technology can examine any information field within the first 64 bytes of each packet to determine the traffic type. Once classified, a packet is assigned a specific class and is forwarded according to information found within the packet header. Each StrataSwitch port has four traffic queues to differentiate classes of traffic and prioritize handling based on network policy. StrataSwitch chipsets will allow manufacturers to build nonblocking switches that support 24 Fast Ethernet ports and two Gigabit Ethernet uplinks. Network administrators will be able to manage a stack of up to 32 StrataSwitch-based switches as one logical entity, Broadcom says. StrataSwitch delivers 9G bit/sec of internal bandwidth and more than 6.6 million packet/sec of filtering capacity whether operating at Layer 2 forwarding, Layer 3 switching or Layer 4 classification, the company says. Popular switch features, such as link aggregation or trunking, port-mirroring, IEEE 802.3X flow control and per-port Remote Monitoring registers, are also built in to the silicon. The device is priced at less than $100 in volume quantities.