Billerica, Mass. - It might take more than a new name to make sense of Bay Networks, Inc.'s Layer 3 switching strategy.
Next week Bay will rename its Switch Node and Rapid City Communications Layer 3 switches Accelar Routing Switches, a new umbrella name for existing and future Layer 3 switches. Switch Node is now known as Accelar 100 while the Rapid City line will make up the Accelar 1000 series.
But Bay must grapple with positioning for Switch Node, which, at $4,000 per 100M bit/sec port and a forwarding rate of 1 million packet/sec, costs and performs much like a high-end router. This flies in the face of Bay's own rationale for routing switches, which are supposed to cost a fraction of what routers cost and perform up to seven times faster.
Bay also must balance current Accelar offerings with those in development that will implement the company's 1 million packet/sec Route Switch Processor (RSP). RSP hardware upgrades may already be in the offing for the Accelar line.
Announced last February, the Accelar 100 - or Switch Node - is a five-slot, 1.2G bit/ sec switch that currently houses up to 64 10M bit/sec ports and eight 100M bit/sec ports (NW, Feb. 17, page 4). It is designed to be a "network center" switch for networks of 500 to 1,000 stations, Bay said.
Next month, Bay will unveil 16-port 10M/100M bit/sec autosensing modules for the switch that enable it to sport up to 64 10M/100M ports. That module will cost about $12,000, Bay said, which means Accelar 100 - with chassis, CPU and four 10M/100M modules - will cost $875 per 10M bit/sec port and more than $4,600 per 100M bit/sec port.
Asked to explain why Switch Node is priced like a router per 100M bit/sec port, product marketing manager Mark MacDonald said Accelar 100 was never intended to be stuffed with 100M bit/sec ports. Indeed, Bay has scrapped its initial plans to add a Gigabit Ethernet module to Accelar 100, according to Bill Hawe, Bays vice president of architecture.
"We're positioning Switch Node as a 10M bit/sec switch," MacDonald said. "We're positioning it as a proof point of our technology."
A 10M bit/sec Layer 3 "network center" switch? At $875 per 10M bit/sec port? "They're dancing," said Craig Johnson, an analyst at Current Analysis, Inc., of Ashburn, Va. "Really what it comes down to is the Switch Node is dead."
"Bay needs to rationalize its pricing a little bit," said David Passmore, president of consultancy Decisys, Inc., of Herndon, Va., in the understatement of the year.
Indeed the company does. At $650 to $700 per 100M bit/sec port and 7 million packet/sec, the Accelar 1000 is, to put it mildly, a better deal. The Accelar 1000, which comes in stackable, four- and eight-slot chassis form factors, is targeted at backbones with more than 1,000 stations, Bay said.
Yet, a price cut for Accelar 100 is not in the offing, Hawe said. Perhaps one will come when Bay expands the Accelar line with new switches based on the RSP, which was unveiled last spring at NetWorld+ Interop 97. Or perhaps Bay will have to do more juggling.
"Even the performance on [the RSP] did not seem as high as Rapid City ASIC solutions," said Current's Johnson. "It will be real interesting to see the game that they actually play here."
We are family
Bay argues that Accelar is family, one that will be tied together by software."There's a series of software or firmware [releases] that improve the fidelity and the function of these devices that is easy to cross-pollinate across this product line," Hawe said. "There's a lot of sharing of technology that you'll see in that dimension even though underneath one might be using a different internal switching structure - RSP, or the technology we got from Rapid City, or the Switch Node."
Hawe did not disclose a time frame for the initial release of this software, nor did he say when RSP-based Accelar switches will emerge.
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