Pretty soon it will be 56Kbps modems but for the moment the technology everyone is claiming to be first to bring to market is Gigabit Ethernet. Last week Prominet Corp said it completed building its Gigabit chipset (CI No 3,093) and Alteon Networks Inc reckons its got there first with its NT offering (CI No 3,105), but it looks as if GigaLab’s has beaten its rivals with GigaStar 3000 its multi-Gigabit Ethernet backbone switch. Designed for enterprise network backbone and server communications, the GigaStar 3000 provides up to eight full- duplex, full-bandwidth Gigabit Ethernet ports using its high- performance 8Gbps switching fabric, says the company. Both the Gigabit Ethernet switch and a Gigabit Ethernet Network Interface Card for servers and workstations are available immediately. The GigaStar 3000 is based on GigaLabs’ supercomputer switching technology. It is compatible with GigaLabs’ input-output switching technology which enables the switch to handle a server’s native input-output subsystem, such as PCI or SBus, without converting it to a network protocol, such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode, FDDI or Ethernet. The base switch, with two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, is about $11,000. The Gigabit Ethernet interface board is $3,500.
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