Santa Clara, California-based 3Com Corp has announced an 18-month switching product roll-out plan. Details are sketchy, but the company will be extending its departmental LinkSwitch line, currently available as part of 3Com’s SuperStack family and as a module for its LinkBuilder MSH, Multi Service Hub, chassis hubs with Token Ring offerings for Fibre Distributed Data Interface and Asynchronous Transfer Mode in the second half of this year and the first half of 1996 respectively; an Asynchronous Transfer Mode Ethernet switch in the first half of this year; and a Fast Ethernet Switch in the second. For Ethernet-only departmental environments, the company will bring LinkSwitch for SuperStack to market in the first half of 1995. On the Asynchronous Transfer departmental front, the company will be releasing its CELLplex Asynchronous Transfer Mode switch in the first half of the year. The CELLplex family, which is available through 3Com’s recent acquisition, Tel Aviv-based NiceCom Ltd (CI No 2,505) is said to feature a non-blocking architecture and meet all Asynchronous Mode standards, and will offer users a migration path to Asynchronous Transfer switched networks, says the company. In addition, the company is adding to its LANplex family of bandwidth-aggregation switches for data centres with the introduction of the 2000 Series. The range will feature 3Com’s ISE chip, which enables packet forwarding at rates above 565,000 packets per second and supports 3Com’s intelligent switching capability, elastic buffering, virtual local area networks, packet filtering, and integrated routing. The first offerings will be the 2500 and 2016 switches. The LANplex 2500 features a modular design that is said to support up to 16 switched 10Mbps Ethernets and two switched high speed ports. The high speed ports are available as either Fibre Distributed Data Interface or Twisted Pair-FDDI with both 100Base-T and Asynchronous Mode interfaces planned for the second half. The LANplex 2500 is said to accept two Ethernet modules, each of which provides eight ports of 10Base-T or 10Base-FL, with 10Base-2 and AUI planned for early this year. The LANplex 2016 is based on the same modular design as the LANplex 2500 and provides up to 16 Ethernet ports, says the company. Ethernet module options will be the same as the 2500. The LANplex 2000 Series switches will be managed by 3Com’s Transcend network management system. Pricing for the 2500, configured with 16 switched Ethernets and one Fibre Distributed Data Interface port, starts as $14,400. The LANplex 2016 configured with 16 switched Ethernets starts at $9,000.
