Milpitas, California-based Network Peripherals Inc has launched its third-generation Ethernet-to-FDDI switching hub, claiming that it guarantees wire-speed performance on each of its ports. The company says the EIFO+ Client-Server Switching Hub provides 12 10Base-T ports and two 100Mbps fibre or unshielded twisted pair FDDI uplinks, upgradeable to six, for backbone access or server communications. The company said it achieved wire-speed performance through a new application specific integrated circuit, dubbed the FIREchip – Fragmenting IP Real-Time Engine – implemented on each port. This contrasts with other approaches, said Network Peripherals, where architectures are based on a central processor or chip. Since these perform IP Fragmentation (where 4,500-byte FDDI packets are broken into multiple 1,500-byte Ethernet packets) at the box level, there is a performance penalty at ports that do not require it, whereas fragmenting at the port level eliminates this. The company also claims the EIFO+ is the only product to support virtual local area network- and segment-based port mirroring, enabling remote diagnosis of traffic problems using an external protocol analyser on a single port. Virtual networking is supported both between Ethernet ports and over the FDDI backbone. The EIFO+ can handle up to 1,014 Ethernet addresses and an unlimited number of FDDI addresses, said the firm. The product ship this month, with prices from $8,500.
