Asante adds controls for VoIP

Asante Technologies recently added “guaranteed” QoS capabilities to its flagship Gigabit Ethernet Layer 3 switches. The company is grooming the IntraCore 35516 line of switches for VoIP traffic.

The switches now guarantee bandwidth for high-priority packets, which could be VoIP. Alternatively, it could be video or any other traffic deemed worthy. Network managers can specify a certain amount of bandwidth be set aside for, say, VoIP, and the switch will provide that, no matter what, Asante says.

The switch also now supports Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol. VRRP is a protocol used to ensure that another switch can take over if the first one fails. Asante’s implementation also allows network managers to balance traffic loads among two to four of the switches.

Protocol support now includes: Routing Information Protocol, Open Shortest Path First, Border Gateway Protocol v4, Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol, Protocol Independent Multicast Sparse and Dense Modes, Source Specific Multicast, and Multicast Source Discovery Protocol.

Another new feature is Q-in-Q VLAN Tunneling, but this is targeted more at service providers than enterprises. ISPs can use it to tunnel traffic marked with IEEE 802.1Q virtual LAN tags across their network without worrying about VLAN IDs from different customers conflicting. Rate limiting is also supported on each port; this allows an ISP to provision a service in 1M bit/sec increments.

The 35516 comes in two configurations. One has 16 copper ports for 10/100/1000M bit/sec Ethernet and four ports that can be configured as either copper or fiber. That’s available at $3,225. The second configuration offers 16 fiber-optic ports (with GBICs ranging from $133 to $1,766 each) plus four ports of 10/100/1000M bit/sec copper-based Ethernet.