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ATM Backbone Switches

By Joel Conover Your enterprise backbone is the most critical piece of your network infrastructure. The switches and routers that make up your core network serve hundreds or thousands of employees. If you're looking for a scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure that will last five years or longer, you should consider ATM. It remains the only proven technology that offers all of these features today. Where Gigabit Ethernet start-ups offer new and proprietary features, ATM vendors offer proven, standards-based solutions.

To evaluate ATM's performance on campuswide network backbones, Network Computing invited ATM backbone switch vendors to submit their products for testing and scrutiny in our University of Wisconsin lab. We asked these vendors for switches with capacity for at least 12 OC-3 ports, a 5-Gbps backplane and a price of less than $2,000 per port--restrictions we felt were reasonable for enterprise ATM backbone devices. Eleven vendors responded to our invitation, but only five sent us products. Cisco Systems, FORE Systems and Xylan Corp. met our requirements with the LightStream 1010, ForeRunner ASX-1000 ATM Backbone Switch and OmniSwitch Omni9, respectively, while Madge Networks and Olicom submitted devices with smaller backplanes--the Collage 740 Backbone ATM Switch and CrossFire ATM Switch 9100, respectively.

To view the Report card.
Noticeably absent from the roundup are some big players. Cabletron Systems and 3Com Corp. said they didn't have the resources to support our tests, while Bay Networks claimed to have a bigger, better product in the works, and didn't want to subm it its Centillion hardware for testing. NEC and Newbridge Networks had new switches they couldn't supply in time for our review. Digital Equipment Corp. products didn't meet our pricing requirements.

We tested the submitted switches for signaling performance and buffer management (see "How We Tested," page 84). We scrutinized their hardware and software feature sets, and evaluated their management packages. When the dust settled, the ForeRunner ASX-1000 stood well ahead of the competition in terms of performance, and it earns our Editor's Choice award, while the Cisco LightStream 1010 offered a comprehensive feature set at an excellent price and merits our Honorable Mention citation.

FORE Systems ForeRunner ASX-1000 ATM Backbone Switch
The ForeRunner ASX-1000 is a screaming performance demon. In our tests, the FORE switch routed 437 calls per second, more than three times the performance of the next-closest product, the Cisco LightStream 1010. In our ATM good-throughput tests, the ForeRunner ASX-1000 had the highest rate of good Payload Data Units (PDUs) sent through the switch--88 percent.