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Regardless of which model you choose, you'll get the same great performance. In the lab, we tested FastIron Backbone Switch and found that it forwards 100 percent of traffic at wire speed on 16 ports. We also found that it aggregates traffic to its Gigabit uplink with 98 percent efficiency. Foundry's engineers said they were shocked to find that their products didn't perform at 100 percent efficiency in our aggregation tests, and vowed to improve the performance for our next Gigabit Ethernet review. In comparison, the Prominet switch multiplexed at 99.9 percent efficiency.

The Foundry switch offers several features we deemed appropriate for a workgroup switch. For security purposes, you can lock down the MAC address table of the switch at any time. This action creates a secure environment, since workstations can talk only if they are known to the switch. The switch a lso features quality-of-service (QoS) features, including 802.3x Flow Control to prevent overflow conditions when switching to a slower media. In the future, the switch will use its multiple queues to enable RSVP class of service.

Prominet Corp. P550 Cajun Switch
The P550 Cajun Switch from Prominet is a backbone switch with an attitude. Prominet is another big player in start-up city. But don't let the low profile of this seven-slot chassis fool you; the Cajun Switch is packed with power. Network architects looking for a high-density Gigabit Ethernet backbone switch will find that the Cajun Switch provides two to four times the capacity of any other switch on the market today.

This product's greatest strengths are its port density and feature set, which rival products from big-name vendors like Cabletron Systems, Cisco and 3Com, as well as those of Foundry Networks. For high-end backbone switching, the Prominet switch is the most scalable gigabit-capable product on the market. The features and scalability of this backbone switch don't come without a price, however. Even in its densest configuration, the Cajun Switch is more expensive than the competition--about $56 more per port.

The P550 Cajun Switch starts with a crossbar switching fabric capable of switching 22.88 gigabits of traffic per second. This architecture provides plenty of bandwidth for the available modules, which include two- and four-port Gigabit Ethernet blades, a 10-port 100BASE-FX module and a 20-port 10/100 twisted-pair blade. The Supervisor module occupies the first slot of the chassis, and the remaining six slots can be populated with up to 120 10/100 Fast Ethernet ports, 60 100BASE-FX ports, or 24 Gigabit Ethernet ports. An optional redundant Supervisor module can be placed in the second slot for fault tolerance. The Prominet switch offers significant performance advantages over the XLNT product in the gigabit switch market. Specifically, the P rominet product is a fully switched product while the XLNT product is built around a 1-Gbps repeate r.

The unit we tested shipped with eight Gigabit Ethernet ports and 20 10/100 Fast Ethernet ports. In our tests with the Netcom Smartbits analyzer, we successfully switched nearly 15 million pps at wire speed--10 Gbps--without significant packet loss. At its highest density--24 Gigabit Ethernet ports--the Cajun Switch would be oversubscribed by about 2 Gbps. We also tested the Cajun Switch's ability to aggregate traffic from 100 Mbps to a Gigabit uplink. It performed this operation with 99.9 percent efficiency.

More than just a big fast box, the Cajun Switch comes ready to power your enterprise. On the outside, the system features a highly redundant architecture, including hot swappable power supplies, fault-tolerant crossbar design and redundant supervisor modules. On the inside, you'll find features like embedded Web-based management, port trunking, redundant load-sharing switch links, class-of-service capabilities and extensive VLAN features. These features are matched almost head-to-head with the Foundry Networks switch.