San Diego, California-based XLNT Designs Inc has unveiled QuikStack, a family of stackable local area network switching products built around a 640Mbps bus. First up is QuikEther, an eight- or 16-port stackable Ethernet workgroup switch built around an XLNT custom application specific integrated circuit which enables QuikEther to support both cut-through and store-and-forward switching. QuikEther provides full 10Mbps wire-speed switching on all ports to a single station or Ethernet segment, or 20Mbps of dedicated bandwidth to a single station when reconfigured for full duplex mode, says the company. An eight-port QuikEther switch has a forward/filter throughput rate of more than 199,040 Packets Per Second and is said to support more than 4,000 addresses. Next is the QuikFDDI+, an Ethernet-to-Fibre Distributed Data Interface workgroup switch said to incorporate the same features as QuikEther Switch, but aimed at linking shared network resources on the 100Mbps FDDI backbone, with 10Mbps Ethernet. The basic QuikFDDI+ features eight Ethernet ports and a Dual Attach Station for direct connection to an FDDI dual ring, says the company, while the QuikFDDI+4 adds four built-in master ports to allow the use of SAS network adapters in servers. The company adds that QuikFDDI+ products can be used stand-alone, or up to five can be stacked.
Software sets
All the QuikStack products use an unidentified 32-bit RISC processor to implement management features including in-band and out-of-band Simple Network Management Protocol, says the company. In addition, all the modules are shipped with software that include TCP/IP, SNMP Agent, Telnet, Telnet File Transfer Protocol and BOOTP/RARP. Additionally, all products support Spanning Tree 802.1d, adds XNLT Systems, and they can support up to eight Virtual Networks, says the firm. The eight-port QuikEther lists for $3,500, with the 16-port version at $6,400. Both will be available next quarter. QuikFDDI+ lists for $10,000 while the QuikFDDI+4 will be available for $12,500. Both will ship in the fourth quarter.
