Digital Equipment Corp has said it is extending its Gigaswitch and Multiswitch architectures to support high performance Gigabit Ethernet systems, pledging its faith in the switching technology. Announcing its plans at the Networld and Interop exhibition in Las Vegas, DEC said it’s Gigaswitch and Multiswitch 900 enterprise switching systems will incorporate new products that will contribute to the company being seen as having the most flexible and highest performing Gigabit Ethernet solution in the industry. Last July saw the Maynard, Massachusetts company updating its Gigaswitch and Asynchronous Transfer Mode family of products to support high performance workgroups and mid-sized backbone environments (CI No 2957). It has also introduced clearVISN, a powerful graphical management suite which enables network managers to concentrate on overall network management, as opposed to device management. The new products will be fully manageable from clearVISN. One of the new products to emerge from Multiswitch 900 is the VNswitch 900GV module, designed to enable uplinks to Gigabit Ethernet technology. Gigaswitch/Ethernet is a modular, high density Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet backbone switch with a throughput of over 20GB per second. The EthernetWORKS/1000 is a Gigabit Ethernet adapter supporting multiple operating systems including Windows NT, Unix and OpenVMS. DEC says the introductions play an important role in its aim of providing a total business offering for its customers.
