Cabletron Systems' new routers are designed to let users cost-effectively extend high-speed routing services from the backbone to the desktop at prices that fall well below the competition.
Cabletron has rolled out SmartSwitch Routers (SSR) 2000 and 8600. They represent the low end and high end, respectively, of Cabletron's SSR family, which until now consisted only of the SSR 8000.
The SmartSwitch Router 8000, which Cabletron obtained from its purchase of Gigabit Ethernet start-up Yago Systems, now fills the middle of the SSR line.
All members of the SSR family will go up against offerings from Cisco, 3Com and Nortel. Cabletron claims it can offer Gigabit Ethernet at $US125 less per port than the cost of products from these vendors.
The new SSR 8600 is a 32Gbps switching router targeted at enterprise backbone applications. It sports a 16-slot chassis for LAN interface port modules, and can support up to 120 10/100Mbps Ethernet and 30 Gigabit Ethernet ports.
The 8600 switches 30 million packets/sec, is fully redundant and includes hot-swappable switching fabrics, Cabletron says.
In the future, the SSR 8600 will support ATM and SONET interfaces, Cabletron says.
Competitively, the SSR 8600 will go up against Cisco's Catalyst 8510 and Nortel's Accelar 1200.
The SSR 2000 is a wire-speed routing switch for workgroups. It includes an 8Gbps switching fabric and can forward 6 million packets per second, Cabletron says.
The SSR 2000 comes with 16 fixed-configuration 10/100Mbps ports and two expansion slots. These slots can hold eight-port 10/100Mbps modules - for an overall capacity of 32 10/100Mbps ports - or two-port Gigabit Ethernet uplink modules.
The SSR 2000 is designed to go up against Cisco's Catalyst 8510, 3Com's CoreBuilder 3500 and Nortel's Accelar 1100 switches.
