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3Com Announces New LAN Products

3Com Corp. has announced enhancements to its CoreBuilder 9000 product family to provide a range of network services for building e-networks. The new enhancements make the CoreBuilder 9000 product family the only chassis platform that can be used in all areas of the LAN; can be scaled with Layer 2 and multilayer switching performance; and can be used for a full range of e-network services beyond the LAN infrastructure.

One such enhancement is the new MultiLayer Switch module. The module is designed from 3Com's Flexible Intelligent Routing Engine (FIRE) ASIC chip. With the ability to configure up to 14 MultiLayer Switch modules in a single CoreBuilder 9000 chassis, the new solution provides up to nine times the performance of competing products. The MultiLayer Switch offers four-gigabit Ethernet ports to deliver wire-speed, IP and IPX routing and switching at eight million packets per second per module. It also offers class-of-service with 802.1p tagging and quality-of-service for bandwidth reservation, as well as up to 24 or 56 gigabit Ethernet MultiLayer Switch ports per eight-slot and sixteen-slot chassis, respectively. The new module can be used throughout the entire CoreBuilder 9000 platform.

Another enhancement is the eight-slot chassis, based on the same platform as the CoreBuilder 9000 16-slot chassis and the upcoming seven-slot chassis. The new eight-slot chassis supports all CoreBuilder I/O modules, switching fabric and management engines, and takes advantage of the 48 Gbps switching fabric by distributing 8 Gbps of bandwidth to each chassis slot.

The new software for the CoreBuilder family of products is 3Com's V3.0, which contains several new management and control features. These include end-to-end 802.1p class-of-service for packet tagging and applications prioritization; virtual routing redundancy protocol (VRRP) to provide dynamic fail-over protection, automatically backing up the network's routing services; and multipoint link aggregation (MPLA) for building fault-tolerant network cores.

New connectivity options available for the 3Com CoreBuilder 9000 family of products include a new six-port FDDI MultiLayer switch module for 100/1000 Ethernet migration from legacy FDDI networks, new four-part Gigabit Ethernet and 20-port 100Base-FX modules for Layer-2 switching, high-density fiber ports with MT-RJ connectors, and new 48-volt DC power supply. The entire CoreBuilder 9000 family will be available in December.

 

Contact 3Com, (408) 326-5000, www.3com.com.

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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