Motorola beefs up branch-office router family

MANSFIELD, MASS. - Motorola will put more guts into two of its branch-office routers and wheel out a battery of new interface cards designed to make it easier for customers to upgrade the devices as their networks grow.

Specifically, the company is announcing Vanguard 6435 and 6455 modular routers, which process packets at three times the speed of the earlier Vanguard 6425, 6430 and 6450 models. The boxes sit in remote corporate locations, connecting LANs to dial-up or dedicated wide-area links.

Karen Prichard, a Motorola product line manager, says the company will announce three new cards for the routers: a 100M bit/sec Ethernet card, an ATM card, and an asymmetric DSL (ADSL) card. The cards can be easily swapped to let customers migrate to higher-speed LANs and faster wide-area connections without having to buy new routers.

The two new boxes are aimed at small, remote offices and regional offices, and seem designed to compete with the Cisco 2500 series of routers, says Erin Dunn, an analyst with Vertical Systems Group in Dedham, Mass. She notes that the routers will not support symmetric DSL, the flavor of DSL typically used by businesses. "Branch offices do not do ADSL," Dunn says.

The 6435 and 6455 routers include a motherboard upgrade that triples the throughput of existing Motorola devices from 5,000 packet/sec to 15,000 packet/sec. There is no formal program to upgrade existing Vanguard 6425, 6430 and 6450 routers by installing a new motherboard, Prichard says.

The new interface cards come in two types: option cards and daughtercards. Both the 6435 and 6455 have three slots to hold daughtercards. The 6455 features two additional larger slots for option cards. Because the slots are bigger, they can contain more ports than the daughtercards. The number of ports varies depending on the function of the card. Both routers handle IP, IPX and AppleTalk, among other protocols.

Cards that fit the older versions of these two routers also work in the 6435 and 6455, Prichard says. Those hardware modules support a variety of interfaces, including serial connections, T-1, ISDN, DSU, voice, voice over IP and voice over frame relay.

The beefed-up motherboards also include processing power to perform 4:1 hardware compression of typical data traffic as well as Data Encryption Standard (DES) and Triple DES encryption.

Base models of the two new routers come with IP routing software and two serial ports. The Vanguard 6435 base model costs $2,500, and the 6455 costs $3,530. Cards range in price from $200 to $1,000. All will be available Nov. 30.

Motorola: www.mot.com/networking