Extreme Networks will make its first official foray into the 10G Ethernet market this week when it announces a 10G bit/sec module for its BlackDiamond Switch.
The module will provide quality-of-service (QoS) and traffic-shaping features, and the ability to move Ethernet packets at 10,000M bit/sec, the company says.
The blade could help corporate IT users alleviate data center bottlenecks by linking switches with high-speed interconnects, the vendor adds.
Also being announced this week is new IP telephony gear from Shoreline Communications, which is expanding IP phone and voice-over-IP protocol support on the company's distributed VoIP system. The new Shoreline and Extreme products also will be deployed as the voice and data infrastructure at the NetWorld+Interop 2002 show next month in Las Vegas (see story).
Extreme's 10G Ethernet module will be a single-port, one-slot blade for its BlackDiamond chassis switch. While Extreme is one of the last large Ethernet switch players to announce a 10 Gigabit module - Enterasys Networks, Cisco, Riverstone Networks, Foundry Networks, Nortel and Avaya have announced products - the company says its offering will have wire-rate QoS capabilities, which competing 10G Ethernet products lack.
"I could see us using the 10G [blade from Extreme] to interconnect our data center switches," says Tony Crognale, a network technician with Scottsdale Insurance in Arizona, which has more than 30 Extreme BlackDiamond switches deployed. "10G would let us free up some of our trunked Gigabit ports and just hook our backbone," with a single fiber connection, he says.
10G Ethernet is not urgent at the firm, Crognale says, but new projects, such as IP video to the desktop and the move to a "paperless" office continues to increase the company's bandwidth usage.
Extreme says it is addressing an area of the nascent 10G Ethernet market that has been overlooked - the ability to traffic-shape packets moving at 10,000M bit/sec without latency or delay.
Extreme's blade will have a distance limitation of 6.2 miles over single-mode fiber-optic cable - multimode fiber will not be supported in the first module release. The module will be available in the summer for about $60,000.
Meanwhile, Shoreline will release its Shoreline4 IP telephony system with expanded support for the Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP) IP phones and the use of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as the base technology for IP call control among Shoreline devices. MGCP and SIP are protocols developed by the International Telecommunications Union and Internet Engineering Task Force, respectively, for setting up and controlling packet telephony traffic.
Shoreline's offering is a hybrid IP/analog phone system where call control and switching is distributed throughout a LAN. ShoreGear VoIP switches attach to a LAN switch and support digital phone handsets that can be reused from older systems or purchased new from Shoreline. In Shoreline4, the company is replacing a proprietary interswitch control protocol with SIP, which Shoreline says will open the system more to supporting SIP-based IP devices or applications such as Windows Messenger in Windows XP. MGCP phone support will let IP phones be used on the Shoreline system for the first time.
Shoreline has certified Polycom's SoundPoint 500 IP phones on Shoreline4.
Shoreline competes with 3Com, Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel, Nortel and Mitel, among others in the midrange VoIP market for businesses with 100 to 5,000 phones.
Experio Solutions, a technology-integration company in Dallas, installed Shoreline's system last year. The firm has 19 offices nationwide and approximately 800 employees on the system, which has saved the company on long-distance charges and helped improve productivity, says Michael Shisko, the company's IT director.
"People love the productivity enhancements you can get on the [Shoreline] system by using the PC and phone together," Shisko says. Experio employees can click on a name in their Microsoft Outlook contact databases and that sends a signal to the Shoreline system to call the contact on the user's desktop phone. The company also has an online corporate phone directory that can be used to dial other employees from the PC.
Because the Shoreline devices are deployed in a distributed configuration, the company does not have to worry about a significant loss of phone service in the case of one device failing, Shisko says. The company also saves 80% on what it used to pay on long-distance by running its interoffice voice traffic across the company's data VPN, provided by Qwest Communications, he adds.
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