With an eye on the small and medium business (SMB) market, 3Com Canada Corp. recently released new gigabit Ethernet switches, designed to act as an entry point transport for high-speed connectivity. The Mississauga, Ont.-based company has introduced four new gigabit Ethernet switches that come in both managed and unmanaged flavours.
The 3Com unmanaged OfficeConnect Switch 8 with Gigabit Uplink is a nine-port switch that comes with eight 10/100 ports as well as a 10/100/1000 port for uplinks or server connections and starts at $150. The unmanaged OfficeConnect Gigabit Switch 5-port, starting at $45 per gigabit port, is a 10/100/1000 switch that comes in a small form factor designed for small offices. The 3Com 2816 16-port and 2824 24-port unmanaged 10/100/1000 switches offer fixed configuration for rack mounted or standalone implementation, the company said. Pricing is yet to be determined. On the managed side, the company has introduced the 3824 10/100/1000 24-port switch, a standalone switch designed for branch offices and SMBs, which starts at $150 per gigabit port.
HP to ship Cisco storage switches
Hewlett-Packard Co. has begun reselling Cisco Systems Inc.’s line of MDS storage switches. HP joins IBM as the initial resellers of Cisco’s line of multi-protocol switches. In addition to offering the MDS 9509 and 9216, HP will also introduce a new schema for selling switches.
According to Edgardo Lopez, a marketing manager at HP, the company will now have a B-series of products, M-series, and C-series. The first initial of the individual series represents Brocade Communications Systems Inc., McData Corp. and Cisco, respectively. Each offers a family of switches that are sold with HP’s line of storage arrays. Lopez says this classification will make it easier for customers and shows the breadth and depth of HP’s offering.
Peribit offers VPN bandwidth guarantees
Peribit Networks Inc. has announced software for its appliances designed to provide users with bidirectional bandwidth guarantees over virtual private networks (VPN). The Sequence Reducer Software 3.1 release allows IT managers to curtail incoming Internet traffic that’s non-critical, such as online games and personal Web surfing, and assign greater VPN bandwidth priority to key business applications.
The new release adds support for allocating bandwidth to inbound traffic to the software’s existing ability to allocate outbound bandwidth. The upgrade also works to reduce the number of redundant and unnecessary packets running over VPN links.