Rochester, New Hampshire-based Cabletron Systems Inc has unveiled the first products in its MMAC-Plus SmartSwitch 9000 Series line of manageable switches. The initial launches are Ethernet and FDDI single-slot, ASIC-based modules for its MMAC-Plus enterprise switching hub (CI No 2,618). They have a forwarding rate of 750,000 packetsper second, raising the aggregate switching performance of the 14-slot chassis by a factor of 10, to 10.5m packets per second. Up to 16,000 Media Access Control addresses per port are supported. The SmartSwitch Ethernet 9000 switch module features 24 ports, quadrupling the port density of the MMAC-Plus to 336 separate segments, while Full Duplex switched Ethernet operation is said to allow for 480Mbps of maximum bandwidth per module. Versions are available for 10Base-T and 10Base-FL protocols. The SmartSwitch 9000 FDDI dual-port switch module enables up to 28 separate FDDI rings to be switched in a single MMAC-Plus chassis, and can be used to connect two external FDDI networks to the MMAC-Plus’s Internal Network Bus 2Gbps backplane, which is said to support simultaneous transport of both packet and Asynchronous Transfer Mode cell traffic. A configuration option will also enable the modules to be used to interconnect the two internal Flexible Network Buses in the MMAC-Plus to the Internal Network Bus. Pricing and availability have yet to be announced. Over the next six months, Cabletron said it will announce SmartSwitches for wiring closet, backbone and enterprise switching applications. Cabletron promises that these will support Ethernet, FDDI, Token Ring, 100Base-T, VGAnyLAN and Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks.
