Bothell, Wash.-based Allied Telesyn International has entered the router market with an inexpensive family of products that target the small- and medium-size business and education markets.
“Choice has been something many people have been lacking,” said Allied Telesyn’s director of marketing, James Mustarde. “Access to the Internet is not the sole domain of large enterprise, they don’t have to pay-as-you-go, they can afford to put up the large up-front capital to install large chassis-based systems. The educational establishments, small business ISP, business who are looking to do simple T-1, frame relay-type stuff, they want to pay-as-you-go, they’re looking for back-to-back router pairs so they can just scale as necessary.”
He added that with the Allied Telesyn product set, particularly in the school system where large budgets are not an easy thing to come by, organizations are almost getting an apples-for-apples replacement to Cisco hardware and paying up to 50 per cent less. “A router is a router is a router. You can pull out a Cisco router and stick an Allied Telesyn in and nobody would know the difference,” he said.
An extension of the company’s LAN product line, the AT-AR family offers a selection of routers designed to support organizations with anywhere from four to 500 WAN access clients with different combinations of basic and primary ISDN, frame relay, x.25, T-1 and dial-up analogue support.
According to Mustarde, Allied Telesyn’s emphasis on standards-based features that guarantee full interoperability with existing networks is carried through in these products.
“All the various PAPs, CHAPs, DACP, these are all standards-based functionality sets that people expect to run,” he said. “The bottom line is, if you look at the features set, the feature set is not the issue anymore because it’s a standard. It’s like Ethernet, you can’t derive subsets of Ethernet and then expect people to use it, it has to be absolutely transparent in terms of how people can use it, how they set it up, what their knowledge base is about the technology.”
The routers are shipped complete — including the operating system and advanced features for security, management and performance, said Mustarde. “All the NAPs and the PAPs and the varied types of protocol, we’ll do all the security protocols, encryption, compression, all that standard stuff,” he said. “If somebody is confident about what they want to do with it, if they know what levels of security or encryption they want to run then we can do that. That’s the beauty of our solution, because it’s not a feature set discussion. We are not offering anything less than you can get with anybody else.”
Chicago-based Web site design company, UNETY Systems Inc., uses the AR720 for its client hosting services. “Some of our clients need Internet connections, so we run a loop to our office and we use an Allied Telesyn for their connection,” said Craig Wheatley, UNETY’s assistant manager of systems/networks.
“One thing I really like about it is its ease-of-use. The configuration is really, really simple, and very easy to understand,” said Wheatley. “They run great; they run just as well as a Cisco but they’re cheaper, the tech support is a lot better and the configuration is easier.”
With an emphasis on savings, the first seven products in the AT-AR family are available now, with a list price ranging from US$325 for the basic AT-AR130 to US$1095 for the AT-AR720 that incorporates network security and VPN capability. For more information, visit Allied Telesyn at
www.alliedtelesyn.com
.