Allied Telesis revamps Gigabit switches

Networking vendor Allied Telesis today unveiled a new series of its stackable Layer 2 gigabit switches for the enterprise, the latest enterprise networking vendor to unveil major products this week.

The AT-8000GS switch line is the successor to the company's existing AT-8000S enterprise switch range, and the company claims it remains the only Layer 2 Gigabit switch range offering physical rather than virtual stacking support.

The range comprises of two 24-port models, one with Power over Ethernet (PoE) support, along with a 48-port model. All models offer a 20Gb ring stacking topology, allowing six switches to be stacked and interconnected, creating a single physical managed device with up to 288 ports which can be deployed at the core or the edge of the network. Support for 802.1x RADIUS and TACACS+ allow for secure authentication and access control, as well as remote security administration.

"Ethernet has replaced frame relay and ATM technologies, within telcos, service providers and large enterprises that previously relied on the latter for high bandwidth, secure and reliable communications," added Rami Houbby, vice president of strategic partnerships at Allied Telesis.

The company has invested heavily in developing Ethernet products as both carriers and enterprise customers migrate networks to Gigabit and multi-Gigabit frontline and backbone networks.

"Our research and development spending is split about 50:50 between our enterprise and carrier products, but the majority of revenues still come from the enterprise market," Takayoshi Oshima, the chairman and chief executive of Allied Telesis told IT PRO.

The AT-8000GS range is priced at $1,500 (£750) for the basic 24-port, $2,600 (£1,300) for the 24-port PoE model, and $2,800 (£1,400) for the 48-port model. All three models will be available from the end of February.

The new products and pricing significantly undercut the range of virtual stacking enterprise switches announced on Tuesday by rival Juniper Networks, while market stalwart Cisco announced a new series of its Nexus enterprise switch products on Monday. All three also face competition from Chinese manufacturer Huawei and companies such as 3Com and D-Link, both of which are going after the mid-market for switches.

Allied Telesis also announced a new Layer 3 switch - the SwitchBlade x908 - for the carrier market.

The switch provides a 640Gb fabric, along with Power over Ethernet (PoE) support and quality of service (QoS) capabilities, allowing carriers to provision quality-assured connections and metering to customers as needed, while redundant hot-swappable power supplies and support for Ethernet Protected Switched Ring (EPSR) can reduce failover times to less than 50 milliseconds in the event of a complete link failure.

"In a large business of campus, the x908 can be at the network core, or be the core itself. It can also be stacked using an 80Gb link cable," said Allied Telesis' labs managing director Dr Allan Miller.

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