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To: Luis who wrote (19008)	11/6/1998 12:29:00 AM
From: Curtis E. Bemis	Respond to of 77400

Hi Luis- I'm glad you like Jachs posts. Myself, I can read the 30 or so posts he has made today, all the same, or refering to one of his earlier missives on the LU, the FORE, the CIEN, the 3COM and maybe more, threads. I like it when he does'nt talk about investing or have anything to offer--don't you think that is cool ??

To: Luis who wrote (19008)	11/6/1998 12:46:00 AM
From: jach	Respond to of 77400

Extreme Networks' BlackDiamond 6800: An Infrastructure Gem By Joel Conover Extreme Networks, noted supplier of desktop switching solutions, recently surprised Network Computing with an exclusive invitation to test its first chassis-based switch, the brand-new BlackDiamond 6800. With 256 ports of 10/100-Mbps twisted-pair Fast Ethernet or up to 32 Gigabit Ethernet ports, you might call it the Hope Diamond of switches. BlackDiamond's price starts at $5,995 for an empty chassis; a fully loaded chassis will cost $115,000--a daunting figure for any network manager. However, it seems more economical when you calculate the price per port, which comes to $449 per 10/100 Fast Ethernet port or about $3,600 per 1000BASE-SX Gigabit Ethernet port. At high densities, give BlackDiamond two legs up on the competition--it costs less than similar Layer 3 products by $200 (Foundry Networks) to $800 (Cisco Systems). Multifaceted Tests To test the switch, I trekked to Chatsworth, Calif., home of Netcom Systems' new SmartLab facility. Equipped with special versions of Smart Applications, Advanced Switch Tests and VLAN Advanced Switch Tests, I put BlackDiamond through a battery of performance tests at Layer 2 and Layer 3 using all 256 10/100-Mbps ports. BlackDiamond has a total of 10 slots, eight of which may be used for media modules. The remaining two slots are reserved for switch-control processors. A 32-port 10/100-Mbps module and a 4-port gigabit module are now available. Expect additional modules to be available by year's end. BlackDiamond is a shared-memory switch. Each slot has four 1-Gbps taps into the backplane. A load-balancing algorithm passes traffic between different line cards on the switch. I ran Netcom's AST X-Stream Layer 2 benchmark against Extreme's BlackDiamond. During testing, it forwarded more than 38 million packets per second across 256 ports without dropping a single packet. With 32 Gigabit Ethernet ports, BlackDiamond forwarded more than 47.6 million packets per second without dropping a frame. Simply put, this switch is the fastest wire-speed switch available, and the fastest switch Network Computing has ever tested. Internally, each slot on the switch supports 4 Gbps of throughput. With eight media modules and two switch controllers, BlackDiamond switches 32 gigabits of traffic per second. To power all eight of BlackDiamond's media module slots, you'll need to connect to a 220-volt AC power source. While the switch will be operational on 110-volt power, only half of the slots will be active. BlackDiamond is built on the same ASIC chipset as Extreme's Summit line of switches. Like Extreme's desktop switches, BlackDiamond supports IP routing in hardware. In our tests, the switch routed more than 38 million packets per second with only minimal packet loss. Engineers at Extreme claim that the packet loss was attributable to software buffering issues, and they expect that those snags would be eliminated by the time the product ships. Like its smaller Summit cousins, BlackDiamond supports OSPF, RIP (Routing Information Protocol), DVMRP (Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol) and PIM (Protocol-Independent Multicast) Dense Mode routing protocols; 802.1Q-compliant VLANs (virtual LANs); and extensive standards-based QoS (quality of service) features. An important new feature of the BlackDiamond platform is OSPF ASBR (Autonomous System Boundary Router) functionality, which lets the switch redistribute routes between RIP and OSPF. There's also new support for ESRP (Extreme Standby Router Protocol), a hot-standby failover mechanism for Layer 3 IP networks. ESRP enables higher resiliency in IP-based networks. Other features include the ability to identify and assign QoS to packets based on UDP (User Datagram Protocol) and TCP port number. This functionality lets you prioritize Web traffic over FTP traffic. It also enables you to filter unwanted TCP and UDP traffic from your network. Software support for IPX routing is in the works. BlackDiamond is well-equipped to drive your enterprise. The system features dual load-balancing switching engines and load-balancing redundant power supplies. Modules in the switch can be swapped without powering down the switch, though a manual command must be issued to reinitialize the swapped card. A future software release is expected to automate the hot-swap feature.