January 1999
By Andrew Cray and Stephen Saunders
Hot Products:
Enterprise WAN Equipment—ATM Switch
ATM Grows Up
Fore's ASX-4000 is bigger and faster than the competition's
offerings
With its ASX-4000 ATM switch, Fore Systems Inc. is thinking
big-and bringing big benefits to corporate networkers. It's the first ATM
switch, carrier or enterprise, with OC48 (2.488-Gbit/s) ports, and it's
the biggest chassis out there, delivering up to 40 Gbit/s of full-duplex
nonblocking throughput.
The ASX-4000 has helped Fore (Warrendale, Pa.) buck the downward trend
in ATM sales and extend its lead in the backbone market. Overall, revenues
from sales of enterprise ATM backbone equipment fell 10 percent in the
third quarter of 1998, but Fore actually saw revenues climb 8 percent,
according to market research group Dell'Oro Group (Portola Valley, Calif.).
It's also hearing positive comments from users. "Other vendors simply don't
have the high-end performance," says Willis Marti, director of computing
at the computer science department of Texas A&M University (College
Station, Texas), which is deploying the ASX-4000 to link two parts of its
campus network at OC48 speeds. "Our users are going to need that performance
soon." 
Why it's hot:
High-capacity
enterprise ATM
switch
The ASX-4000 has 14 slots for vertically loaded cards; two slots are
reserved for what the vendor calls SCPs (switch control processors), redundant
central processors that control the whole device. Another four slots are
reserved for 10-Gbit/s switching fabric cards. The remaining eight are
for the ATM port cards; one carries 1 or 2 OC48 ports, another supplies
8 OC12 (622-Mbit/s) ports, and another supplies 16 OC3 (155-Mbit/s) ports
and 4 OC12s. Fore also is alone in supplying concatenated OC48s (known
as OC48c) on an ATM switch. This means the switch sees the bandwidth as
a true 2.5-Gbit/s pipe.
As for performance, the vendor says the switch can set up 900 SVCs (switched
virtual circuits) per second across all ports, although this hasn't been
confirmed in independent tests. What is proven is the vendor's supremacy
in quickly rerouting around failures using the PNNI (private network-to-network
interface) protocol. In a Data Comm test, its ASX-1000 replaced a broken
path with a new route in just 7 milliseconds-20 times faster than its closest
rival . Fore says its ASX-4000 is based on the same architecture and should
therefore produce similar results.
Net managers who want something on the same scale as the ASX-4000 usually
have to buy carrier-class products like the GX550 from Ascend Communications
Inc. (Alameda, Calif.) or the Catalyst 8540 MSR from Cisco Systems Inc.
(San Jose, Calif.). But they can cost a lot more than the ASX-4000. Ascend's
nonredundant 25-Gbit/s GX550 loaded with 16 OC3 ports and four OC12s is
priced at $333,000. A nonredundant 30-Gbit/s ASX-4000 from Fore with the
same port configuration lists for $155,000. Fore's pricing starts at $55,000
for a chassis with one switching fabric card and one SCP, rising to $145,000
for a chassis with four switching fabric cards and one control processor.
An OC48 adds $84,000 to the cost; an OC12, $9,140; and an OC3, $1,550.
Still, some net managers may be concerned about reliability: The ASX-4000
does not support a redundant switching fabric.