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

To: StockMan who wrote (5630)	5/3/1998 8:51:00 PM
From: Beachbumm	Respond to of 6980

My response to that would be, you won't get $50 a share in cash from anyone. You will get stock for stock. Personally, I cannot vote for anything less than $40 a share since it is pretty clear that BAY can get there on its own. This does not alter my view that BAY should strive to remain independent until it has at least regained a position of strength with increasing revenues. Beachbumm

To: StockMan who wrote (5630)	5/3/1998 9:02:00 PM
From: blankmind	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6980

in response to point number one the accelar switch, bad news: Switch takes Layer 3 to extreme Low-cost Summit48 opens desktop possibilities By Pankaj Chowdhry, PC Week Labs 04.27.98 Peeling back the layers of Gigabit Ethernet Extreme Networks' New Summit48 switch significantly lowers the price for Layer 3 switching, making the technology's intelligent routing more accessible not only at the enterprise level but also closer to the desktop. In PC Week Labs' tests of the $7,995 Summit48 as a Layer 2 switch, it performed in the same class as Cisco Systems Inc.'s Catalyst 5000, which weighs in at $51,000 for a comparable configuration. For $3,000 more, the Summit48 can be upgraded to a Layer 3 switch, which places it on par with Bay Networks Inc.'s $68,000 Accelar 1200. Extreme's device, which shipped earlier this month, has 48 switched 10/100M-bps auto-sensing Fast Ethernet ports and two full-duplex Gigabit Ethernet uplinks. Coupled with features such as Web-based management and support for four remote monitoring groups on every port, the Summit48's low price makes it a PC Week Analyst's Choice, affordable not only for wiring closets and workgroups but for desktop PCs. However, Extreme's switch lacks a few of the niceties necessary for deployment in a network's core. As a Layer 3 router, the Summit48 can forward 10.2 million packets per second, but it lacks the modularity of 3Com Corp.'s CoreBuilder 3500 and the support for OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) found in Bay's Accelar 1200. Given its low price, however, we could easily envision a company not needing a modular switch--it could just buy several Summit48 switches for redundancy. To test compatibility, we connected the Summit48 to an Alteon Networks Inc. AceSwitch and a Hewlett-Packard Co. AdvanceSwitch 8000 via Gigabit Ethernet. In both cases, we had the link up and running in less than 5 minutes, which indicates that vendors may have finally gotten Gigabit Ethernet compatibility right. The Summit48 includes an embedded Web server and was very easy to manage. Using the Web-based management interface, we quickly configured protocol-sensitive virtual LANs along with several classes of service options. We also tested the 2.0 code for the Summit48, which will ship at the end of June. This upgrade will add support for OSPF and solve most of the minor problems we found with the switch's user interface when configuring routing options. We used Netcom Systems Inc.'s SmartBits 1000 traffic generator to test the Summit48, connecting streams directly into the switch and through several intermediate switches (the latter to simulate an aggregation environment). It passed every Layer 2 test with flying colors, not dropping a packet while aggregating 10 fully utilized Fast Ethernet streams onto a Gigabit Ethernet link (see chart). As a Layer 3 switch, the Summit48 did almost as well. The only problem occurred when there were unknown routes to a destination, as is the case with some Internet-bound traffic. In this case, the Summit48 could no longer forward traffic at wire speed using its very fast 32-bit prefix matching algorithm but had to use its slower longest-prefix matching algorithm instead. In longest-prefix matching, table look-ups for each IP destination are compared with the entire routing table, and if several matches exist, the CPU will choose the one that most closely matches the destination address. This will not be a problem for most sites using the Summit48, as long as they do not put the switch next to a high-speed Internet connection. PC Week Labs Executive Summary: Summit48 The price/performance of Extreme Networks' Summit48 Layer 3 switch places it in a class by itself. Packed with 48 Fast Ethernet ports and two Gigabit Ethernet ports, it will fit almost anywhere in a network, except the core. Pros: Very inexpensive; wire-speed performance; high density; extensive management capabilities. Cons: No support for OSPF; doesn't perform wire-speed routing via longest-prefix matching algorithm; lacks modularity. USABILITY B CAPABILITY B PERFORMANCE A INTEROPERABILITY A MANAGEABILITY A Extreme Networks, Cupertino, Calif. (408) 342-0999; www.extremenetworks.com PC Week Labs' scoring methodology can be found at www.pcweek.com/reviews/meth.html