ATM switch headlines new Lucent net wares

Lucent Technologies Inc. last week announced the forthcoming release of a series of data-networking products including a core Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switch that was scheduled to be shipped to the Energy Department's Sandia National Laboratories late last week.

Dave Schriftgiesser Lucent's product platform manager for the company's GlobeView 2000 Release 2 said Sandia will receive the first delivery of the new 20 gigabits/sec GlobeView switch and will use it to link its Lucent 5ESS-2000 switches to run voice communications over ATM.

The switch also will serve as the core of Sandia's data network and as a gateway for lab employees to access the Internet he said.

Mike Vahle manager of advanced network integration at Sandia said his organization now uses the first release of the GlobeView switch and hopes to gain greater speed and flexibility from the new version. He said the lab has been using the switch at the core of its unclassified network as well as using it to merge voice and data flowing between sites in Albuquerque N.M. and Livermore Calif. "We're basically using the switch to multiplex voice and data on the same leased line " he said.

In addition to the GlobeView announcement Lucent unveiled the MX 1000 ATM edge switch for high-end enterprise wide-area networks. The company also announced two new access concentrators the AC 120 and the AC 60 to integrate T-1 frame relay and Ethernet traffic onto an ATM infrastructure.

Susan Barbier director of market development at Lucent said the new products represent a new commitment by the company to support ATM in the federal government and private companies. She said Lucent officials believe ATM will be users' best choice for supporting electronic commerce and other critical business applications.

"For transaction processing we feel that ATM is the protocol of choice to meet the quality-of-service needs of our customers " Barbier said. "ATM is not just high bandwidth but manageable bandwidth. And it is scalable so it will grow with customers as their needs change."

Schriftgiesser said the new GlobeView switch which will ship commercially in the second quarter of next year supports line-card interface speeds of up to 622 megabits/sec and includes fully redundant hardware and software that virtually eliminated downtime during field tests with Sandia.

"Sandia has been a very good partner " he said. "They've been using the switch to hook up their very powerful supercomputer to their network. We got a very thorough shakedown...in their tests."

Sandia's Vahle said Lucent's ATM solution has worked successfully at the labs which include about 400 users with ATM to their desktops. "We were looking for very high reliability and a lot of growth capacity and this meets our requirements " Vahle said.

Will Engler a Lucent product line manager said development of the company's new 10 gigabits/sec MX 1000 ATM edge switch emphasized traffic management and reliability to allow more users to run voice and video along with local-area network data on their ATM infrastructures. The switch will begin shipping in March.

"One of our differentiators is the ability to consolidate voice and data on one common platform " Engler said. "Without good traffic management you're really not able to do that. You have to be careful that this [voice and video] traffic is not crowded out by big data bursts."

He said the MX 1000's commercial list price would start at $54 000 for four 622 megabits/sec ports. The 1.2 gigabits/sec AC 120 concentrator will start at $35 000 and the 600 megabits/sec AC 60 will start at $18 000.

Both concentrators will ship by the end of this year.

A Lucent spokeswoman said all of the new products will be available on Lucent's General Services Administration schedule contract.