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

To: RFF who wrote (4197)	2/12/1998 10:25:00 AM
From: RFF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6980

I was wrong, but the Network World review doesn't mention anything about the Accelar 1200 not working with DHCP. I think they would if it didn't. Some exerpts from the Network World article: "Bay Networks,Inc.'s eight-slot, modular Accelar 1200 Routing Switch, the first product from Bay's acquisition of Rapid City Communications last June, exhibited numerous problems. However, we were able to test only a late beta version of the switch - it was not scheduled to begin shipping until this month." "Still, Bay gets credit for showing up. A number of vendors that claimed to be shipping Gigabit Ethernet switches by the end of last year were invited to participate, but declined. In many cases, we learned that these products either were not yet shipping, despite vendor claims to the contrary, or were still in beta testing and were not ready for an independent evaluation." "Bay's Accelar 1200 Routing Switch held up well for scalability, capacity and supportedGigabit Ethernet options. A major plus is that the switch accommodates 16-port 10/100Base-T modules, in addition to two-port Gigabit Ethernet modules, all within the same switching system. It would have been nice, however, if Bay had put at least one 10/100 port on its control module or somewhere in its switch chassis. The Accelar 1200 is an eight-slot chassis, which, with one or dual redundant control modules, leaves six slots for interface modules. The system wields a rated backplane switching capacity of 7.5G bit/sec in each direction, for a total of 15G bit/sec. The Bay switch handled the four concurrent gigabit traffic streams we delivered to it. However, we noticed some loss with 1G-bit/sec traffic streams consisting of all large packets (1,518 bytes), on the order of about 2% of all packets. We found, too, that broadcast packets would not be propagated properly by the switch if they came in at a high rate. When a stream of broadcast packets was delivered on one port at the full gigabit rate, only about half of these were retransmitted out on the switch's other ports. Bay claimed these were known problems with the beta software that would be fixed before final release. Another major problem we encountered was with the Bay switch's Spanning Tree Protocol implementation. Increasingly, switches rely on Spanning Tree to prevent redundant data paths, or loops, from causing network crashes. Also, Spanning Tree provides a reliable, standard mechanism for automatically switching over from a primary path to a redundant path, if the primary path should go down. But Spanning Tree wasn't working right on the Bay switch, a problem the vendor acknowledged and said it was working on. Bay offers a new Windows-based AccelarView package for managing this Gigabit Ethernet switch. It consists of separate Device Manager and VLAN Manager applications. We tested late beta Version 0.67. As with the switch, we ran into a few problems with the management software. The graphical representation of the switch is super, and details are easily obtained by clicking on the switch part, or port, of interest. However, we couldn't get two key functions to work properly: the trap log part of Device Manager and the VLAN Manager. Bay's Accelar 1200 has a lot of the makings of what could be a great switch. The price is disproportionately high, though, and Bay still needs to work out a few problems in the beta cycle before final release."