Las Vegas - Intel Corp. and FORE Systems Inc. announced at NetWorld + Interop today plans to integrate Intel's Ethernet products with FORE's ATM products under a joint development, marketing and sales alliance.
The two companies will create technology as well as work together on products and industry specifications. The first result of the alliance is FORE's ES-2810 Switch which incorporates Intel's Fast Ethernet switching technology.
Intel's first integrated offering, possibly to come later this year, will involve adding an ATM interface to the Express 500 Series of scaleable, stackable switches, said Frank Gill, executive vice president at Intel and general manager of the small business and networking group. Next, the companies will focus on developing the next generation of switches, distributed routing and voice over IP services, he and FORE executives said.
Although many consider ATM and Ethernet to be competing technologies, officials from both companies assured that they are actually complementary. In addition, there is little overlap between what the companies are currently offering, they said.
"Both Gigabit (Ethernet) and ATM can reside together in a solution," said Mark Christensen, vice president of Intel's small business and networking group and general manager of the network products division. Choosing between the technologies depends on the size of the customer and if the customer is already using Ethernet, he added during a press conference.
It also depends on the types of applications customers are using or want to use, said Ron McKenzie, vice president of strategic marketing at FORE.
ATM helps provide reliability and scalability for larger companies by enabling prioritization of traffic and consolidation of voice, video and data, the companies said in a statement. Ethernet offers affordability and ease-of-use critical to workgroups or smaller networking environments, it said.
While the alliance is not exclusive, executives from both companies said they had found their partner for the two technologies.
Meanwhile, FORE will still support and enhance its Power Hub product it acquired when it bought Alantec, said Thomas Gill, president and chief executive officer of FORE.
FORE's ES-2810, which allows up to 196 ports per stack, will be available in June for $3,695. It comes standard with 24 ports of 10/100 autosensing Ethernet and two expansion slots for additional 10/100BaseTX or 100BaseFX ports. An optional Stack Interface Module and the Stack Matrix Module offer interfaces for scaling multiple switches.
Separately, Intel announced two new stackable 10/100M-bit-per-second per-port, auto-sensing hubs - the Intel Express 220T 12 and 24 port Stackable Hubs and the Express 210T, which formerly was the Express 10/100 Stackable Hub.
Intel also is dropping the price of the Express 210T to a per-port price of $69. The Express 220T Stackable Hub can be stacked with Intel's Express 210T hub for up to 192 ports. The Intel hubs will available beginning this May at prices ranging from $1,279 to $1,649.
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