Palo Alto, California-based Ipsilon Networks Inc has announced a new hardware component for its IP Switch ATM1600 that transforms it into what’s claimed as the fastest and highest density Fast Ethernet backbone switch available. The company also announced enhancements to its IP Switching system software that provides finer granularity of control over local quality of service policy. The new component, called the FAS1200, supports a combination of 24 10/100Mbps Ethernet ports and four 155Mbps Asynchronous Transfer Mode uplinks, or 30 10/100Mbps Ethernet ports and a single ATM uplink. Designed for a collapsed backbone implementation, it integrates Ethernet and Fast Ethernet local network segments into the hardware-accelerated IP Switched network, thus boosting performance. Each Fast Ethernet Flow Module in the FAS1200 provides conversion between Fast Ethernet frames and ATM cells. More importantly, each module participates in the flow-classification process at the root of IP Switching performance optimizations, says Ipsilon, directing longer lasting flows of Internet Protocol packets onto the appropriate virtual connection for direct cut-through switching by the ATM hardware. The result is a fourfold increase in performance compared with conventional router-based systems, says Ipsilon. Each Fast Ethernet Flow Module independently feeds its own dedicated ATM port on the IP Switch ATM1600, so the capacity of the FAS1200 backbone system scales proportionately to the switch fabric. The FAS1200 chassis costs $4,000. Fast Ethernet Flow Modules, offering two 10/100Mbps Ethernet ports and 1 ATM port, are $4,900. The products wil l be available by the end of the year. With the new software, IP Switches can base flow classification decisions on any of several fields in the Internet Protocol datagram header, including source or destination address, service type, or transport protocol. Using flow classification, each IP Switch can steer packets onto an ATM virtual connection with a QoS appropriate to the application. Applications need not be rewritten to comply with ATM Forum standards; instead, the TCP/IP information in the Internet Protocol packet can set up the appropriate quality of service. The software will come as a free upgrade by the end of the year.
