LAS VEGAS -- It's been a long time coming, but N.E.T. is finally shipping its ATM switch, the Promina 4000, and is showing it off this week at NetWorld+Interop 99.
The modular switch, which was announced two years ago and was supposed to be available last spring, got bogged down because the N.E.T. didn't throw enough people into development, the company says.
But with all the extra time it took to develop, the company says the shipping product is thoroughly tested. It has announced one beta tester, the University of Alabama, and says it will announce another customer soon.
The 19-slot chassis has a maximum switching capacity of 10G bit/sec. The switching fabric is distributed among hardware cards that each provide 622M bit/sec of switching capacity, so customers can fit the switching capacity to their needs without paying for more than they need, the company says.
The switch boasts a feature N.E.T. calls contentionless switching, which is intended to reduce cell loss and maintain quality of service (QoS) during periods when traffic peaks. Incoming ATM cells share the switch fabric and traffic is buffered at outgoing ports. Buffered cells leave the switch in accordance with priority rules governed by a feature called swift cell traffic management.
That scheme prioritizes traffic in accordance with QoS requests on the fly to reduce cell loss and maintain service levels. The switch is in compliance with Cisco's IP QoS schemes and will evolve with Cisco gear to remain compliant, N.E.T. says.
Promina 4000 is available now and costs $58,000 for a base model that includes a chassis, power supply, one switching card and four, single-port OC-3 cards. T-3 cards are also available.
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