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Technology Stocks : BAY Ntwks (under House) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: StockMan who wrote (3474)	1/14/1998 7:19:00 PM
From: James Song	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6980

>Cisco is following close behind :) I just received the Network Computing today. It has a summary for testing the central site routers. The summary title is King of the Road. I don't know if the article can be found in their web site. I cannot type the whole article here either. But I thought that I can put a few paragraphs here to make Bay faithfuls happy. Here they come: To qualify for our tests, vendors had to support either OSPF or RIP version 2 routing protocols. We asked each vendor to submit a multiprotocol router as well as a hardware-based IP or IPX router. In the end, we received products from Bay Networks, Extreme Networks, and Foundry Networks. Bay submitted the BCN (Backbone Concentrator Node), a full fledged multiprotocol, modular router, while Extreme and Foundry submitted hardware based Layer 3 switching routers. The vendor absentee list was particularly high. Notably absent is router giant Cisco Systems. Despite our days of prodding and cajoling, the company could not muster up the hardware to send to our lab. The excuse (this time) was unavailability of product and support personnel-- or perhaps it was just afraid of losing face to competitors, 3Com Corp. could not provide us with a RIP 2 or OSPF-compliant router in the time frame of our testing, and Madge Networks was in the process of rolling out its LANNET branding and could't provide us with a product for testing. Of the distributed routing vendors that did participate, we tip our hats to Bay and Foundry. Bay's BCN surprised us with its ease of configureation, variety of interfaces and overall stability..... Our test results indicate that both the Foundry NetIron and the Extreme Summit2 are extreme fast Layer 3 devices with a variety of features that make them quite suitable for enterprise deployment. However, we also uncoverd some serious shortcomings in their software design--Bay's BCN was the only product that operated flawlessly on our real-world network. --James