SynOptics Communications Inc, Santa Clara, California has announced a three-phase Asynchronous Transfer Mode strategy, in preparation for the launch of its Asynchronous Transfer Mode switch towards the end of the year. The company sees campus-wide backbones as the first wide-scale implementation of the technology, followed by Asynchronous Transfer Mode to the desktop. Perhaps surprisingly, wide area Asynchronous Transfer network services are seen as the final phase, since SynOptics feels that carriers will be slower off the mark to respond to demand (despite the fact that AT&T Co said that it will introduce Asynchronous Transfer Mode services towards the end of the year). SynOptics is basing its hopes on a six-chip Asynchronous Transfer Mode chip set developed in partnership with Washington State University. It claims two specific advantages over competing products: the lowest cost per port, and the fastest aggregate throughput of comparable products, claims based on the architecture that the chip set uses. It is matrix-switched, which SynOptics says avoids the bottlenecks that can be caused with a bus-based approach, since each port on the switch has a dedicated 155Mbps transmission speed, guaranteed by an aggregate internal switching capacity of 5Gbps. Called LattisCell, the switch is a 16-port stand-alone switch that comes in two configurations. The Model 10102 has 12 shielded twisted pair ports for local links and four fibre ports for links over up to 6,000 feet. The Model 10104 has 16 fibre ports. To ship in the third quarter, the 10102 will cost less than UKP1,500 per port, and the 10104 will be priced at below UKP2,000 per port.
Technology partnership with Sun Microsystems
SynOptics also announced that as part of its Asynchronous Transfer Mode strategy, it has entered a technology partnership with Sun Microsystems Inc, enabling the companies to work in parallel on Asynchronous Transfer Mode development. Indeed, it says it’s working on an Asynchronous Transfer Mode SBus adaptor board, also expected by the end of the year, for use in Sparcsystem 1, 2, and 10 workstations: occupying a single SBus slot, it will support the Local SONET Synchronous Optical Network 155Mbps Physical Layer as defined by the Asynchronous Transfer Mode Forum. There are to be options for fibre, unshielded twisted pair and shielded twisted pair connections, and the price is expected to be under UKP1,300. While SynOptics says that adaptor boards for other physical layer and computer system interfaces will be added, no time-scale has yet been given for their development. Also announced was LattisCell Connection Management System, connection and network management software for switched and permanent virtual circuits, and LattisCell Asynchronous Transfer Mode Management Application 1.0, an Asynchronous Transfer Mode management system that integrates into SynOptics’ Optivity network management system. The CMS Connection Management System software runs on a Sparc workstation, and is claimed to provide all call set-up, maintenance and tear-down functions for switched and permanent virtual circuits in a multiple switch network. Resource allocation and topology monitoring is also handled by the software, while network topology and client addresses are automatically learned with calls re-routed around failures. SynOptics claims that the system matches the agreed Asynchronous Transfer Mode Forum signalling functions and will conform to the final specification once this is complete. The Management Application manages networks comprising multiple LattisCell switches, and SynOptics says it will assist the network operator in handling faults, learning about network operation and performance, and reconfiguring network parameters to alter performance. Integrated into the Optivity network management system, it’s claimed to allow for management of an entire network including Ethernet, Token Ring, FDDI and Asynchronous Transfer Mode technologies.
