Cabletron Delivers New FDDI Capabilities
Extending FDDI capability for users of the company's MultiSwitch 900 switching chassis, Cabletron Systems (Rochester, N.H., www.cabletron.com) announced two VNswitch modules: VNswitch 900FF and VNswitch 900FX.
VNswitch products enable administrators of FDDI networks to combine multiple technologies in the network and migrate to new technologies such as Gigabit Ethernet, without changing the chassis. The VNswitches also allow concurrent layer 2 switching and layer 3 routing.
According to Emmy Johnson, analyst with Cahners In-Stat Group (Scottsdale, Ariz.), her company's research indicates that more than half of the current users of FDDI will continue to run FDDI as their network backbone technology in the year 2000. These new VNswitch products could enable customers to extend the life of FDDI.
Cabletron claims that VNswitch 900 products deliver more than 750,000 pps aggregate switching throughput, line-rate layer 2 switching on all ports, and concurrent layer 3 IP routing at 100,000 pps.
Additional features include 4 MB of packet buffer dynamically shared across ports, an additional 8 to 16 MB of onboard dynamic memory, support for 8,000 MAC addresses per module and IP packet switching between IP subnets. In addition, the VNswith 900 switches can connect to other VNswitches across the 1-Gbps distributed switching fibre on the MultiSwitch 900.