Santa Monica, Californiabased Retix Inc has a highend local area network Ethernet bridge, to add to its family of local and remote bridges. The Retix 4660 has filtering rates of 29,000 packets per second and forwarding rates of 13,650 packets per second sustainable while running IEEE 802.1 Spanning Tree Protocol and handling broadcast traffic. The 4660 is aimed at network administrators that need to upgrade bridges while preserving existing investments. By downloading new software versions through the network from a Retix network management station or a personal computer, administrators can remotely update each bridge’s software. The 4660 can also isolate traffic on subnetworks. For example, networks comprising diskless workstations that create a high volume of traffic when transferring data from the server can be isolated. This division keeps the bulk of the data off the main network, but gives diskless workstation users access to any devices on the entire network. Other features include autolearning, transparency and special filtering. The bridge supports plug-in, modular interfaces for standard 802.3/Ethernet, Thin Ethernet, and 10Base-T. Users can select any combination of two interfaces and change these as needed. The 4660 also adheres to the industry standard IEEE 802.1 Spanning Tree Protocol, including the latest version, and is interoperable with other bridges that adhere to it; US list price is $3,750.
