At least for the time being, Warrendale, Pennsylvania-based Fore Systems Inc seems to have set a new low price point for 100Mbps Asynchronous Transfer Mode. The company is shipping Asynchronous Transfer Mode workgroup packaged systems starting at a US list price of $1,500 per connection, representing $1,000 per switch port and $500 per host adaptor. The price quoted is for the package in a 24-port, 24-adaptor board configuration – packages are also available with 18 ports at 100Mbps, and in 16 or 12 port configurations, running at 155Mbps, with prices rising to $2,400 for the last bundle. At 100Mbps, the products use a TAXI, Transparent Asynchronous Transceiver Interface, multimode fibre interface while, at 155Mbps, multimode fibre or Category 5 unshielded twisted pair can be used. All of the bundles include Fore’s ForeThought internetworking software. The switch included with the bundle, the ASX-200WG, is claimed to have a 2.5Gbps non-blocking switching capacity, supporting Quality of Service for the range of traffic classes (Constant, Variable, Available and Unspecified bit rates). Other features include dynamically allocated smart buffers, Per Virtual Circuit Queuing, Packet Level Discard and support for local area network emulation and IP-over-Asynchronous Transfer Mode. Its 200+ switching fabric (also new) is based around Intel Corp’s 80960 RISC processor. It is also available on a stand-alone basis from $1,000 per port (for 16 100Mbps ports) to $1,915 per port for 18 155Mbps ports. The new adaptors, the ForeRunner 200E Series, are available in SBus, EISA, and GIO formats. Also using the 80960 processor, they are based around a four element design: an Enhanced Segmentation and Reassembly ASIC, said to offload all segmentation and reassembly functions from t he host processor, the bus-specific interface ASIC, the 80960 processor, and the integrated physical media interface. They are available stand-alone, costing from $1,000 to $1,200. Fore is planning to launch the products in Europe towards the end of the summer, when pricing will be announced.
