Milpitas, California-based Adaptec Inc will pay $68m in shares (CI No 2,926) for Cogent Technologies Inc of Friday Harbor, Washington, because it reckons its own input-output experience combined with Cogent’s Fast Ethernet offerings will help dominate a greater share in the market for high performance input-output server components for file, video, Internet and intranet applications. Cogent, a privately-held company founded in 1982, provides high performance Fast Ethernet products and Adaptec has been looking to get its own system bandwidth management technology into the market. The acquisition comes just as the company has launched a raft of low cost Asynchronous Transfer Mode adapters. Adaptec is claiming to have shattered the Asynchronous Transfer Mode price barrier with the family, which starts at $200 for the 25Mbps version – $95 less than for Fore Systems Inc’s comparable offering. The range incorporates a new physical layer chip, and a new custom Segmentation & Reassembly chip, both developed in-house, which is how the company says it got the price down so low. The ANA-5910EL 25Mbps model is said to support 1,024 open virtual circuits and up to 40 active virtual circuits, and comes with 128Kb of buffer memory. Standard on the model is support for the LAN Emulation standard and drivers for Windows 3.1, Windows95, Windows NT, MS-DOS and OS/2. Support for NetWare will be added next month. For $50 more, users will be able to buy the ANA-5910DX, which is fundamental ly the same, but with support for 200 active virtual circuits and Classical IP on Windows NT. This is being pitched specifically as a high-performance desktop or workgroup server adapter. At the higher end, the company has launched two new 155Mbps models: both the ANA-5930 for unshielded twisted pair and multimode fiber-based ANA-5940 support 1,024 open virtual circuits, and up to 200 active virtual circuits, and have 512Kb of buffer memory. Both have the same drivers as the 25Mbps versions, a nd support LAN Emulation and Classical IP on Windows NT. They will be $500 and $600 respectively. The ANA-5901EL ships next month, the others are shipping now.
