In a bid to break its RISC-based desktops out of the low-speed Ethernet bottleneck, Hewlett-Packard Co has linked with Sunnyvale, California company Crescendo Communications Inc to offer a series of FDDI- and CDDI-based 32-bit EISA bus adaptors. These will support HP Apollo 9000 Series 700 workstations using FDDI over unshielded twisted pair, shielded twisted pair, and fibre optic cable. The Crescendo EISA-HP adaptors provide 100Mbps connections for a Hewlett-Packard workstation to any FDDI or CDDI concentrator. Products include the C320-HP CDDI EISA Adaptor, C321M-HP FDDI EISA Adaptor, C325 CDDI EISA Dual-attach Option, and C316M FDDI EISA Dual-attach Option. Single-attach adaptors require a single slot; the dual-attach option needs a second one. According to Crescendo, all products support the Simple Network management Protocol agent and are compatible with SNMP-based network management systems such as Hewlett-Packard’s Openview. The SNMP network management application, the C1802 Crescendo manager for the HP/Apollo workstation provides remote management of any Crescendo concentrator on the network, using a graphical representation of the concentrator front panel. The C320-HP CDDI EISA Adaptor is $1,500. The C321M-HP FDDI EISA Adaptor is $2,000. The C325 CDDI DAS and C326M FDDI DAS options are available for $700 and $1,400. The C1802 Crescendo Manager for HP is available for $900. All products are available today
