Sunnyvale, California-based Kalpana Inc has made fault-tolerant additions to its EtherSwitch range of switched Ethernet hubs. Of these, one is basically the existing EPS-1500 model equipped with dual power supplies, each of which takes 50% of the total energy load. Should one of the power supplies fail, the other automatically assumes the entire load. The second model – the Fault Tolerant EtherSwitch – comprises two of the company’s 15-port EtherSwitch EPS-1500 units operating in parallel with mirrored port-by-port connections to hubs, servers, and network nodes. The units are connected via a serial cable to a VT100 terminal, which monitors their status, and is said to detect failures in the primary EtherSwitch automatically, and cut over to the standby unit. At any one time, one EtherSwitch is said to be operational while the other is testing the operational unit, and itself. Kalpana says that network administrators can also set the two switches to trade functions at intervals ranging from one minute to 45 days. The Fault Tolerant EtherSwitch EPS-1500 is to cost $7,500 with a single power supply, $9,500 for the dual power supply model. The Dual Power EtherSwitch is to cost $3,000, $1,000 more than the existing single power model. The products are due to ship about now.
