D-Link announces high-end chassis-based Fast Ethernet switch

D-Link has announced the DES-6000 high-capacity, manageable Fast Ethernet switch that provides the scalability and flexibility that is required to deploy a cost-effective network environment.

According to D-Link SA sales manager Attie Pienaar, the DES-6000 has nine slots -- one that is dedicated for a management module and the remaining eight can be equipped with optional switch modules.

"These include a 16-port 10/100Mbps NWay 100BASE-TX module, a 12-port 100BASE-FX (MT-RJ) module, a 2-port GBIC-based Gigabit Ethernet module, and a 2-port 1000BASE-SX/LX (MT-RJ) Gigabit Ethernet module. Using these optional switch modules, the DES-6000 will support a maximum configuration of 128 10/100Mbps Ethernet ports or 16 Gigabit Ethernet ports. The DES-6000 also comes with redundant power supply to ensure continuous operation," adds Pienaar.

"The DES-6000 Layer 2+ switch is built for high-performance packet switching. All ports support half- and full-duplex communications," continues Pienaar. "All the UTP ports are equipped with auto-negotiation technology to automatically detect and support the speed and mode of connected devices."

Besides its large MAC address table support of up to 32K MAC addresses, the DES-6000 further enhances packet switching performance by supporting store-and-forward switching with back-plane bandwidth up to 21.3Gbps and it supports the IEEE 802.1d spanning tree protocol.

"Up to 2048 Virtual LAN entities can be supported with the DES-6000`s IEEE802.1q port-based Virtual LAN capabilities," says Pienaar. "

Integrated flow control includes IEEE802.3x flow control for full-duplex mode and back pressure in half-duplex mode. Furthermore, port aggregation support enables grouping of links between the switch and another switch or server to increase bandwidth. It also creates load balancing between links to provide a fail-safe connection to mission-critical servers or network centre.

IEEE 802.1p priority queuing is a standard-based priority queuing that enables prioritisation of multimedia or time-sensitive traffic, making possible integration of video, voice, and data in a network. In addition, the DES-6000 switch has a new class of IP multicast that examines all IGMP traffic such as video and audio broadcasting, allowing multimedia applications to be delivered easily to the workgroup.

The DES-6000 switch provides Broadcast Storm Filtering function to monitor and constrain the level of broadcast traffic on each port. It also provides the built-in Web-based network management such that networks administrators can easily monitor the status and retrieve data from the network via any Web-connected workstation. Furthermore, administrators can complete configuration and management DES-6000 by the Web-based management.

In addition to the Web-based network management, networks administrators can manage the network and complete configuration of DES-6000 via console or Telnet. It also provides SNMP agent support for the following Management Information Bases (MIBs): Bridge MIB (RFC 1493), RMON MIB (RFC 1757) and MIB-II (RFC 1213).

The four RMON groups (Remote monitoring) that are supported include statistics, history, alarms and events. All connectivity, switch modules and redundant power supplies are all hot swappable. Intelligent, dual load-sharing redundant power supplies enable DES-6000 to offer uninterrupted operation.