Nortel Networks Unveils Unified Enterprise Switch Platform
Positions Customers for Business Success
by Enabling Revolutionary Web-Time Applications
HANOVER, Germany, March 17 /PRNewswire/ - Nortel Networks (NYSE: NT/TSE: NTL) announced today at the CeBit show, the Accelar 8000 platform, the newest addition to the award-winning Accelar family of enterprise switches. A proof-point of the company's Unified Networks strategy, the groundbreaking Accelar 8000 platform delivers the resilient, application-optimized performance necessary to provide true data, telephony and video application integration.
Our strategy of transforming customers' current multiple networks into a single telephony/video/data-capable network is Unified Networks, and the Accelar 8000 platform is a critical building block for enabling customers to build their unified infrastructure,'' said Dave House, president of Nortel Networks. ''The Accelar 8000 platform provides a lower total cost of ownership while unleashing new generation business applications that enhance competitive advantage.''
The Accelar 8000 platform uses the company's Optivity policy and network management software to deliver a fail-safe, LAN/WAN networking solution. With non-blocking forwarding performance scaling to 200 million packets per second (Mpps), the Accelar 8000 platform provides industry-leading performance and network availability to empower innovative and critical business applications such as electronic commerce, Enterprise Resource Planning and telephony services.
With the announcement of the Accelar 8000, it's clear that Nortel Networks hasn't lost any momentum during its acquisition of Bay Networks,'' said David Passmore, Research Director of NetReference, Inc. ''If anything, the Accelar 8000 demonstrates how the merged Nortel Networks has developed an incredibly flexible platform that should be able to accommodate the convergence of voice, video, and data, and virtually any future enterprise customer networking demands.''
The Accelar 8000 platform, which provides the third-generation of Nortel Networks' industry-leading, routing switch capability, integrates the benefits of multiple networking technologies into a common, unified platform. (Based on a recent report from industry research firm The Dell'Oro Group, Nortel Networks led the entire Layer 3 switching market with 37 percent revenue share for calendar year 1998.) These characteristics are key to Nortel Networks' strategy of providing Unified Networks which create customer value worldwide by delivering integrated network solutions spanning data and telephony.
The Accelar 8000 switch platform provides customers with a migration path to higher-density switching while maintaining full compatibility with the company's current enterprise solutions, including the Accelar 1000 routing switches, new Accelar 700 server switches, Centillion family of Multi-LAN switches, BayStack 450 switches, and Passport Multiservice WAN switches.
The Accelar 8000 should allow us to cost-effectively customize and enhance the network architecture of our many sites using a standard platform to satisfy multiple business-critical applications requirements,'' said Jean-Marc Laurent, France Telecom-OCISI, Project Manager, Network Architectures. ''The OCISI should be able to support the growth of critical applications while containing equipment and training costs by using some of the advanced Accelar 8000 features.''
The Accelar 8000 switch platform, available in 6- and 10-slot chassis, scales from 50 Gbps to 256 Gbps without requiring costly chassis or backplane upgrades. The Accelar 8000 platform supports Layer 2 (L2), Layer 3 (L3) and Layer 4 (L4) classification, filtering and switching. It scales in density to 384 10/100 edge switched connections, 192 100 BASE-FX ports, and up to 128 Gigabit Ethernet ports. The new switch platform also expands Nortel Networks' ATM solution set, featuring OC-3 and OC-12 line cards and will feature Packet over SONET (POS), multi-service ATM Wide Area Network (WAN) connections and 10-Gigabit Ethernet. In addition, the Accelar 8000 platform will be the first Nortel Networks solution to deliver Wave Division Multiplexing (WDM) technology to enterprise customers. This solution leverages the technology that Nortel Networks obtained through its recent acquisition of Cambrian Systems, a leader in metropolitan optical networking.
Enterprises require extreme resiliency for business-critical applications, and the Accelar 8000 platform leverages Nortel Networks' technology strengths to bring the highest reliability to customers whose network is their business. All critical system components are duplicated to eliminate single points of failure. Line card modules are easily hot-swapped, with the replacement module automatically reconfigured to the original module's settings.
The Accelar 8000 platform also implements Nortel Networks' industry-leading redundant MultiLink Trunking (MLT) technology to provide scalable riser, server and inter-switch bandwidth of 32Gbps or more, with the trunk ports distributed across separate modules. This eliminates the single point of failure found in many trunking implementations, which terminate on a single module in the chassis.
The IETF standard, Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP), which eliminates the single point of failure of the backbone routing function, is also fully supported.
The Accelar 8000 platform enables the implementation of lower-complexity, two-tier campus architectures -- wiring closet edge switches connect directly to network center switches performing both riser and server aggregation, and MAN/WAN connectivity. This supports the deployment of Unified Networks that greatly simplify network operation by delivering exceptional flexibility, scalability and straightforward configuration and management.
The Accelar 8000 switch is the first integrated platform from Nortel Networks to offer wire-speed packet classification, filtering, policing and accounting to closely align network operations with business priorities. These policies are centrally defined, configured and distributed throughout the network using end-to-end Optivity policy management and integrated LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) directory services from Microsoft, Novell and Netscape.
The Accelar 8000 platform also delivers the sophisticated and intelligent queuing algorithms necessary to guarantee high quality and availability. It uniquely features eight hardware-based queues to allow differentiated service levels for business-critical data applications and telephony services.
The Accelar 8000 platform facilitates deployment of a single, consolidated enterprise infrastructure to eliminate system duplication and dramatically lower the overall cost of ownership. The 8000 platform's flexible architecture enables customers to deploy intelligent edge switching in the wiring closet and application-optimized routing switching and multi-service WAN connectivity in the network center using a single chassis, significantly reducing the overall cost of building and maintaining an enterprise network. This flexibility provides customers with a maximum return on their investment.
The Accelar 8000 switch platform comes in 6- and 10-slot chassis, which are expected to begin shipping in April 1999. Pricing starts at US $7,995 for the 10-slot chassis. The Accelar 8000 platform is the first modular 10/100 switch with pricing at under $300 per port.
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