Although Bay Networks Inc. just began shipping its Gigabit Ethernet switches, the company remains bullish on ATM.
Bay is close to unveiling a "tactical solution" for ATM backbone switching that may be built by a third party, said Joe Kennedy, vice president and general manager of Bay's switching products division. This approach will enable Bay to bring a higher capacity ATM backbone switch to market quicker than by internal development.
"We don't have to own [the switch] but we have to control it," Kennedy said.
Bay said it needs a "pure" ATM switch to replace the System 5000BH in network centers for high-density OC-48s. Kennedy would not disclose the source of the new switch but rumors are circulating that NEC USA Inc. or Fore Systems Inc. are candidates. Kennedy would not comment on those rumors.
This year Bay also has a number of LAN switching enhancements on tap to bolster its frame and cell strategies for the wiring closet and network center.
For frame-based Layer 2 switching in the wiring closet, Bay this third quarter will unveil next-generation BayStack 10M-bit-per-second Ethernet and 10M/100M-bps autosensing Ethernet switches that may be stackable and may support Gigabit Ethernet uplinks, Kennedy said.
Bay also is considering Layer 3 switching capabilities for the new BayStack line in the price range of US$225 to $250 per port, Kennedy said. Layer 3 switching this close to the desktop would help ensure delivery of quality-of-service policies to the user, he said.
For cell-based wiring closet switches, Bay will unveil next-generation Centillion ATM switches by year-end. In addition to OC-12, Private Network-to-Network Interface and Multi-Protocol over ATM, the switches will sport higher LAN and ATM port densities, Kennedy said.
Frame-based network backbones will see a next-generation Accelar Gigabit Ethernet switch from Bay by year-end, Kennedy predicted. Like existing Accelar switches, this new switch will be based on a shared memory architecture, but it will be faster. The box will feature more sophisticated queuing and will forward about 70 million packets per second.
Bay also plans to add the Resource Reservation Protocol, high-density fiber links, IP Multicasting, IPX routing and high-speed serial WAN links to the Accelar line by year-end, Kennedy said.
In addition to the tactical ATM core switch, Bay's other cell-based backbone switches - the Centillion line and the System 5000BH - will getOC-48 and Gigabit Ethernet links, voice support via circuit emulation, and IP Multicasting support.
With these enhancements on tap, Kennedy all but confirmed the death of Bay's Accelar 100 Layer 3 switch, which is better known as Switch Node. "We're not doing any more development on it, but it's still on our price list," he said.
Bay: (408) 988-2400.
