Bolt Beranek & Newman Inc and the Ungermann Bass Inc arm of Tandem Computers Inc have wasted no time in announcing first fruits of the joint venture that is to lead to the formation of Lightstream Corp, in which Ungermann will take a 20% stake (CI No 2,221). The company has announced the first of a new family of enterprise backbone Asynchronous Transfer Mode switches designed to offer integrated wide and local area networking capabilities. The partners claim that Lightstream 2010 is the first enterprise backbone Asynchronous Transfer Mode product with an architecture designed from the outset to support the functions of both a wide area bandwidth manager and a multiprotocol bridge-router efficiently. It has 2Gbps switching capacity and is designed for use as a high-performance enterprise backbone for buildings, campuses and wide area networks. It takes a variety of multi-port line boards for specific functions. All common components can be configured with optional redundancy, and are hot-swappable. It will be managed via standard Simple Network Management Protocol systems such as HP OpenView and SunNet Manager or Ungermann-Bass’s NetDirector. Interface modules supported in the first release include a two-port module for line speeds of T3/E3 – 45Mbps/34Mbps, and an eight-port module supporting line speeds from 56Kbps to T1/E1 1.5Mbps/2.0Mbps. The two-port module supports the Asynchronous Transfer Mode User-Network Interface and interswitch trunking. The eight-port module supports Frame Relay access, Frame Forwarding for X25, HDLC and SNA/SDLC protocols and interswitch trunking. Native local network interfaces supporting bridging and multiprotocol routing and support for OC-3 speeds will be added by mid-1994. Support for constant-bit-rate voice and video is expected to be ready by the end of 1994. All three firms will mark et, with Ungermann calling it EagleSwitch. It will start at $25,000, October.
