Digital Equipment Corp announced plans to build a Giga-switch, a network and cluster interconnect, at DECworld in Boston last week. Critical for hooking Alphas and VAXes, DEC said the system would be protocol-independent, capable of handling everything from multi-vendor personal computer local networks to multi-vendor mainframes. Based on crossbar switch technology, a Giga-switch system could make over six million dynamic connections a second with point-to-point connections between systems and switches, enabling multiple Fibre Distributed Data Interface networks to be interconnected. The technology has a potential aggregrate throughput of 3.6Gbps. It enables resources to be dynamically reconfigured. Initial plans include a 22-FDDI port, a DS3 wide area network, multi-protocol routing, up to five Giga-switch systems and SNMP-compliant management software.
