the Pipeline

Ahead of the curve

Officials at Hewlett-Packard's ProCurve Networking division have released new products and updates.

ProCurve products use the Adaptive Enhanced Data Rate for Global System for Mobile (GSM) Communication Evolution Architecture for wireless networks, which is a faster version of GSM wireless service.

The company recently announced the ProCurve Routing Switch 9400sl series. One model, the 9408sl core switch, has a full set of features, said Al Madden, Americas product manager for ProCurve Networking.

They include a high-density wire speed of 10-gigabit Ethernet for up to 32 ports and up to 320 wire-speed gigabit ports. Other features include 1.28 terabits of switching capacity, a throughput of 480 million packets per second per chassis and IP version 6 support in the hardware.

The product also includes a dedicated 10/100 Ethernet management port and optional redundant management.

The ProCurve Routing Switch 9408sl with a 20 10-gigabit port configuration costs $310,000 and is expected to be available in August.

In addition, company officials announced updates to several ProCurve products.

Both versions of ProCurve's management software have more features. ProCurve Manager 2.0, which comes bundled at no cost with all manageable ProCurve devices, now offers Link Layer Discovery Protocol for discovery and automation of the registration process.

ProCurve Manager Plus 2.0 is an upgrade that will cost $3,199 but offers a host of additional features including configurable event-driven policies, event-driven template policies, group configuration functions, new diagnostics and improved security.

The ProCurve 5300xl switch family is also getting some free software enhancements that, among other things, enforce security at the edge of the network.

Internet Control Message Protocol throttling, offered in addition to virus throttling, automatically reduces denial-of-service attacks.

HP officials also added authentication features to the ProCurve Wireless Access Point 420 Series.