The MegaSwitch II is a logical extension to NBase's smaller MegaSwitch product, a five-port 100BASE-T switch with two expansion po rts. NBase plans to offer two-port expansion cards for 100BASE-TX and FX, as well as a two-port ATM module soon after the unit ships.

A High-Speed Refresher We tested the MegaSwitch II straight out of the box in an eight-port configuration. We unplugged the workhorse Lantronix multiport switch in our lab, dropped in the MegaSwitch and brought our network back up in minutes. The switch functioned flawlessly for six hours. However, MegaSwitch II's speed-sensing autonegotiation functions didn't work with our existing infrastructure. The NBase switch defaulted to 10 Mbps with the 10/100 adapter we were using. Fortunately, NBase offers a way to lock each port at either 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps.

The MegaSwitch I I isn't short on horsepower, either. NBase claims that it can filter and forward 810,000 packets per second. (Some press materials claim 1 million pps.) We migrated stations from shared media (both 10 and 100 Mbps) onto the MegaSwitch II. It can be configured to operate in full-duplex mode to other devic es that support full-duplex connections.

The switch has the latest features that make your network easier to manage, including port-based VLANs, port-to-port mirroring, a traffic generator for network troubleshooting and out-of-band management via the Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) on the serial port. Via the local interface you can configure the features mentioned, plus adjust Spanning Tree options and tweak the forwarding tables. Managing the switch remotely is done via telnet or an SNMP-capable management package. NBase offers one such product, called MegaVision, which is sold separately. MegaVision can be run as a standalone product or under Novell's NetWare Management System or Hewlett-Packard Co.'s OpenView, and mana ges the entire NBase product line.

When using MegaVision, instead of the command-line interface, the statistics for items such as error counts and illegal packets had plausible values. We also saw unusual values, such as transmission counts for the expansion cards that we didn't have.

With the MegaSwitch, you can direct that all traffic for one port be sent to another port, but the destination port becomes useless for any other traffic. The switch has a built-in frame generator that can be used to load network segments. We used that several times in testing and were happy with the capability, even if it wouldn't be used by most network managers.

Joel Snyder is a senior partner at Opus One, in Tucson, Ariz.
He can be reached at jms@opus1.c om.