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Technology Stocks : FORE Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: w2j2 who wrote (10095)	1/8/1999 9:45:00 AM
From: w2j2	Respond to of 12559

January 1999 By Andrew Cray and Stephen Saunders Hot Products: Enterprise WAN Equipment—ATM Switch ATM Grows Up Fore's ASX-4000 is bigger and faster than the competition's offerings With its ASX-4000 ATM switch, Fore Systems Inc. is thinking big-and bringing big benefits to corporate networkers. It's the first ATM switch, carrier or enterprise, with OC48 (2.488-Gbit/s) ports, and it's the biggest chassis out there, delivering up to 40 Gbit/s of full-duplex nonblocking throughput. The ASX-4000 has helped Fore (Warrendale, Pa.) buck the downward trend in ATM sales and extend its lead in the backbone market. Overall, revenues from sales of enterprise ATM backbone equipment fell 10 percent in the third quarter of 1998, but Fore actually saw revenues climb 8 percent, according to market research group Dell'Oro Group (Portola Valley, Calif.). It's also hearing positive comments from users. "Other vendors simply don't have the high-end performance," says Willis Marti, director of computing at the computer science department of Texas A&M University (College Station, Texas), which is deploying the ASX-4000 to link two parts of its campus network at OC48 speeds. "Our users are going to need that performance soon." Why it's hot: High-capacity enterprise ATM switch The ASX-4000 has 14 slots for vertically loaded cards; two slots are reserved for what the vendor calls SCPs (switch control processors), redundant central processors that control the whole device. Another four slots are reserved for 10-Gbit/s switching fabric cards. The remaining eight are for the ATM port cards; one carries 1 or 2 OC48 ports, another supplies 8 OC12 (622-Mbit/s) ports, and another supplies 16 OC3 (155-Mbit/s) ports and 4 OC12s. Fore also is alone in supplying concatenated OC48s (known as OC48c) on an ATM switch. This means the switch sees the bandwidth as a true 2.5-Gbit/s pipe. As for performance, the vendor says the switch can set up 900 SVCs (switched virtual circuits) per second across all ports, although this hasn't been confirmed in independent tests. What is proven is the vendor's supremacy in quickly rerouting around failures using the PNNI (private network-to-network interface) protocol. In a Data Comm test, its ASX-1000 replaced a broken path with a new route in just 7 milliseconds-20 times faster than its closest rival (see "ATM: Brains and Brawn," May 1998). Fore says its ASX-4000 is based on the same architecture and should therefore produce similar results. Net managers who want something on the same scale as the ASX-4000 usually have to buy carrier-class products like the GX550 from Ascend Communications Inc. (Alameda, Calif.) or the Catalyst 8540 MSR from Cisco Systems Inc. (San Jose, Calif.). But they can cost a lot more than the ASX-4000. Ascend's nonredundant 25-Gbit/s GX550 loaded with 16 OC3 ports and four OC12s is priced at $333,000. A nonredundant 30-Gbit/s ASX-4000 from Fore with the same port configuration lists for $155,000. Fore's pricing starts at $55,000 for a chassis with one switching fabric card and one SCP, rising to $145,000 for a chassis with four switching fabric cards and one control processor. An OC48 adds $84,000 to the cost; an OC12, $9,140; and an OC3, $1,550. Still, some net managers may be concerned about reliability: The ASX-4000 does not support a redundant switching fabric.