Adaptive Corp, a majority-owned subsidiary of Redwood, California-based Network Equipment Technologies Inc has stolen a march on other manufacturers and launched an Asynchronous Transfer Mode designed specifically for local area and campus-wide networks. Initially the ATMX switch takes 16 boards, each of which can provides six ports running at 100Mbps. While this is the same speed as existing FDDI networks, each device attached to the port gets the full 100Mbps all to itself. Adaptive claims that effective switching capacity is currently 1.2Gbps. The company also launched its first ATM adaptor board, designed for Sun Microsystems Inc Sparcstations, but according to Adaptive chief executive Audrey Maclean, this is mainly to pump-prime the market. Adaptive’s business, she says, is focussed on the switches. Apart from the sheer speed of the ATMX, the company is making much of the manageability that comes from having a central switch rather than a shared media local network. Any number of ports can be logically tied together to form virtual local nets that can easily be reconfigured. This is particularly useful, says Adaptive, for companies where users are constantly moving their workstations around: once connected to their new socket, the switch can be swiftly reconfigured to put them back on their virtual network. The leading edge does not come cheap: the starter system weighs in at $45,000 with extra six-port boards costing $26,000. The Sparcstation Adaptors cost $4,500 each, but Adaptive says that by the time an organisation needs to bridge more than three FDDI rings together, the ATMX becomes competit ive. In the medium term prices should reduce with the development of inter faces for copper media ins tead of the existing opti cal fibre devices. Avail ability is September in the US, sometime in 1993 here.
