Alcatel this week introduced the OmniSwitch 9600, the latest in its OmniSwitch 9000 line of chassis-based LAN switches.

Other members of this product line include the 9700 and 9800, which were introduced late last year. These switches were upgrades from the previous OmniSwitch 8000 series, and they support 10 Gigabit Ethernet. At the time, Alcatel was seen as playing catch-up, since other vendors already had 10 Gigabit equipment available. But really, the market for 10 Gigabit is probably just getting started.

The 9800 boasts a capacity of up to 384 Gigabit Ethernet ports, or 96 ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, while the 9700 supports half of that. That's because the 9800 has 16 available slots in its chassis and the 9700 has eight.

The new 9600 is a bit smaller, with four available slots - so its capacity should be half of the 9700, or 24 ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet. A fifth slot is taken up by a management module. One difference with this lower-end version is that there is a single management module, rather than two, as there is in the high-end switches.

The low-end version does take the same modules as the high-end switches, however, and Alcatel is probably hoping companies will buy the low-end version only to migrate their modules to a larger chassis at a later date.

Alcatel pitches the new switch as an element in small enterprise core networks, or in an aggregation layer, or in the wiring closet if you're going to use the Gigabit Ethernet modules. The company also says that the switch is ready for video over IP and that it processes IPv6 at wire speed.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.