Menlo Park, California-based Cisco Systems Inc has begun shipping its HyperSwitch A100 Asynchronous Transfer Mode switch, which it claims is the first switch on the market to support the ATM Forum’s Private Network Node Interface protocol. The HyperSwitch is for use with the company’s ATM Interface Processor, which began shipping in May for the Cisco 7000 family of routers. It forms part of the company’s CiscoFusion architecture, which builds scalable internetworks through routing and multi-layer switching. The HyperSwitch supports up to 16 155Mbps Asynchronous Transfer Mode interfaces. It can support between 1,000 and 2,000 cells of buffering per port. Available interfaces, compliant with ATM Forum specifications, are the 100Mbps TAXI 4B/5B and the 155Mbps Sonet/SDH STS3c/STMI, both on multimode fibre. The company will add Sonet single-mode fibre and copper unshielded twisted pair category 5, DS-3 and E-3 interfaces. Interface types can be mixed. The HyperSwitch supports all traffic ATM Adaptation Layer types and uses a non-blocking 2.4Gbps cross-bar matrix switch fabric designed to minimise cell loss. It has two priority levels and separate queuing classes for data and time-sensitive traffic. It has SNMP. The company has not givern any prices.
