Nortel to ship new Accelar switches in April

Six months after its acquisition of Bay Networks Inc. was finalized, Nortel Networks Corp.(Nortel's new name) is bringing technology of the two companies together in two groups of Accelar routing switches.

The two best things about the Accelar 8000 enterprise switch is its resiliency and support for both Frame Relay and ATM, said Jefferson Wilson, a systems engineer at Annese(stet) & Associates, a VAR in Herkimer, N.Y.

The resiliency is accomplished by duplicating all the critical switch components, Nortel Networks said. Also, line card modules can be hot-swapped and replacement modules are automatically reconfigured to original settings. Other reliability features include redundant multi-link trunking and use of the a protocol that designates another gateway to backup the first gateway.

"It's [the resiliency of the 8000] showing the Nortel influence," Wilson said. "They're building carrier-class switches."

Possibly even more important is the built-in flexibility of the Accelar 8000, he said. Customers who now use Frame Relay connections can buy one of these switches without worrying they are locked in to that technology, he added.

The Accelar 8000 is Nortel Networks' way of effectively meeting Cisco in the enterprise with a switch that supports multimedia, said Bill McSweeney, president of Coopetive Strategies Group, Clinton, N.J. High-speed LAN switching in the enterprise "is the next growth path for data networking," he said.

The Accelar 8000 can run 50 to 256Gigabits-per-second, handles Layer 2, 3 and 4 packet classification, and supports packet-over-SONET, multiservice ATM, Gigabit Ethernet, and Wave Division Multiplexing. It is slated to ship in April at a starting price of $7,995 for a 10-slot chassis.

Nortel Networks is also releasing in April three new server switches. The Accelar 740 is aimed at server farms and its features include support for Layer 4 forwarding and server load balancing. It is priced at $19,995.

The Accelar 750 is also for server farms, but has additional features such as transaction recovery, Quality of Service, prioritization, and Rich Mode operation, a technology aimed at decreasing server response times. It will sell for $32,500.

Nortel Networks is targeting the Accelar 790 at global corporations and ISPs with many locations. Its features include allowing a single URL to served from server farms at multiple locations. It is priced at $27,500.