Allied Telesyn pushes functionality to the edge

Allied Telesyn last week added to its lineup of desktop switches with the AT-8700XL series.

The company is aiming the two Fast Ethernet switches at the access edge. They are in “fixed, yet flexible, configurations,” Allied Telesyn says.

The AT-8724XL has 24 ports of 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet, and the AT-8748XL has 48 ports. They each have two expansion bays, which can hold a fiber Fast Ethernet link, or a Gigabit Ethernet link in either fiber or copper.

Allied Telesyn says the boxes are derived from the company’s Rapier family of Layer 3 switches, but the AT-8700XL series seems to be targeted more specifically at the edge, putting quality-of-service and security functions closer to the end users. This is something we’re hearing more of, as the cost of embedding higher-level functions in desktop switches decreases.

The switches support IEEE 802.1Q for virtual LAN tags and 802.1p for traffic prioritization. They even support Layer 4 traffic classifiers, bandwidth limiting, DiffServ, routing protocols and access control lists.

The AT-8724XL is priced at $1,300, which is about $54 per port. The AT-8748XL costs $1,900 – less than $40 per port. Both are available now.

In related news, Allied Telesyn also reduced the price of its FS700 unmanaged Ethernet switches by 35%.