OmniSwitch 9000 Series

The OmniSwitch 9000 series offerings from Alcatel are 5, 10 and 18 slot modular switches with support for Gig or 10 Gig port connections. The switches are targeted to the network core and/or aggregation layer, and include among their features support for IPv6 and IP Multicasting. They are based on Broadcom's Strata XGS III family of Ethernet switch chips.

Multiple hot-swappable modules are available for populating the OmniSwitch 9000 slots. Choices include a 2-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet (XFP) module, a 24-port Gigabit Ethernet copper (10/100/1000 RJ45) module, a 24-port Gigabit Ethernet fiber-optic (SFP) module, a 6-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet (XFP) module, and a 24-port Gigabit Ethernet copper module (10/100/1000 RJ45) with Power-over-Ethernet support. The 9700 and 9800 switches ship with dedicated management and switching-fabric modules (that take two of the slots; leaving 8 and 16 slots available for population, respectively), and modules can be mixed in the chassis in any combination. The 9700 switch is 11U, while its bigger sibling (the 9800) is 17U. The new 9600, on the other hand, is 5U, supporting one management module and up to four network interface modules.

Management of the switches is via CLI (RJ45 serial console port, in or out-of-band Ethernet access; Telnet/SSH support for remote), Web access (HTTP/HTTPS), or SNMP support (v1/v2c/v3). The switches feature the vendor's Alcatel Operating System, used in the OmniSwitch line and including the WebView element manager and the OmniVista network manager. The 9000 series additionally supports the vendor's Alcatel Quarantine Manager allowing for the identification and isolation of viruses and network attacks.

Other switch features include:

- 8 hardware-based quality of service (QoS) queues allowing for wire-speed packet classification and processing for all packets in a data steam, including the first packet

- Port based VLAN support (802.1Q)

- Support for static aggregate and dynamic aggregate link aggregation

- Flow based bandwidth management to 64k granularity

- Hardware-based traffic filtering (L1-L4)

- Port mirroring (one-to-one, many-to-one)

- Local and remote logging (Syslog)

- Detailed statistics / alarm / debug information per process

New to the 9000 series line is the aforementioned 9600 chassis offering. The vendor states that the two-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet (XFP), 24-port Gigabit Ethernet copper (10/100/1000 RJ45), and 24-port Gigabit Ethernet fiber-optic (1000-X SFP) modules are available immediately; with additional modules available later. The starting price for the 9600 is $2,995.

Visit the Alcatel Web site for further information.