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

To: Bosco who wrote (5564)	4/29/1998 12:32:00 PM
From: Paul Lee	Respond to of 6980

Centris Counts on Bay Networks Accelar Routing Switches for High-Volume Internet Commerce SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 29, 1998--Australia's electronic commerce pioneer Centris Solutions has chosen Bay Networks Accelar routing switches and BCN (Backbone Concentrator Node) routers as the basis of a $2 million (Australian dollars) project to develop a high-speed, fully redundant network that forms the core of the company's entire business. A wholly-owned subsidiary of the United Group, Melbourne-based Centris was formed in 1996 to build an industrial-strength IXC (Inter Exchange Carrier) platform for electronic commerce, Web site hosting, Internet access and Internet-based data warehousing solutions. In April 1997, Centris began to develop a proof of concept for a high-capacity, fault-tolerant network that would form the foundation for a broad range of services based around the Internet. Centris needed a network that could provide fast access to the more than 30 servers used to support its clients, as well as supporting several fast Internet connections simultaneously. Centris' sister company, United Customer Management Solutions (UCMS), has rapidly established itself as a leader in providing world-class practice customer service and billing. Working in tandem with UCMS, Centris will complement its advanced technical infrastructure with the support and billing services necessary to provide comprehensive customer care. Because network downtime can be catastrophic for a company offering commercial network services, uptime was the most important element of the final network design. "If we're out of service for an hour, we risk losing customers that could be worth $100,000 a year to us," explained Andrew Mitchell, Chief Technology Officer with Centris. "We're aiming for 99.99 per cent reliability, which equates to only two outage hours per year. To meet this requirement, our network was designed from the ground up as a non-stop, industrial-strength co-location and service hosting environment with no single point of failure," Mitchell added. After evaluating proposals from several networking vendors, Centris settled on a solution built around Bay Networks' BCN routers and recently-released Accelar IP-based routing switches. Centris chose the BCN because it outperformed the other routers during the proof of concept phase, and also offered a scalable, redundant design that met the company's requirement for fault-tolerant links to Internet backbone providers. Even more critical in Centris' decision, were Bay Networks' Accelar routing switches. Designed to take over IP routing from high-latency multi-protocol routers, Accelar routing switches offer dramatic speed improvements for the type of IP-only network Centris was planning. "After looking at the likely growth of the Internet and our projections for growth of our internal network -- which we expect will eventually need more than 1Gbps at the network core -- it became apparent that we'd need a central switch that could cope with complex IP network routing decisions at wire speed," said Mr. Mitchell. After testing the Accelar against a conventional switched and routed network, Mr. Mitchell said "...its performance was absolutely blistering." Centris saw some noticeable performance gains when they evaluated the Accelar's Layer 2 switching against other Layer 2 switches, but throughput increased by 35 to 40 per cent when the Accelar's Layer 3 switching capabilities were turned on and the switch decided the best route for the IP traffic to take instead of the routers. Additionally, the BCN routers experienced a 20% increase in speed because they no longer had to handle the IP packets. "Bay Networks has shown a strong commitment to our project through its sales support, technical response center, and its long-term strategy and architecture," said Mr. Mitchell. "The company has a unique attitude within the communications industry which is outstanding. Bay has a clear direction, leading-edge products and has been invaluable in assisting us to develop our own long-term strategy."