I-Cube Announces New 48 Port Switch Fabric With Built in Multi Gigabit Uplink Support

Business Wire, April 20, 1998

CAMPBELL, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April, 20 1998--

LS211 Designed to Enable High Port Count, Low Cost 10/100

Switches With Up to 2 Gigabit Uplinks

I-Cube, Inc., the leading provider of high-performance switching solutions, today announced a new switching fabric product designed for the Gigabit Ethernet enabled 10/100 workgroup switch market.

The LS211 enables a range of switches to be built with various combinations of Fast Ethernet ports and Gigabit Uplinks such as the 24/2 switch with 24 ports of Fast Ethernet and 2 Gigabit Uplinks.

"This is the first Fast Ethernet switching fabric designed to support up to 28 ports of Fast Ethernet plus 2 Gigabit Uplinks," stated I-Cube's CEO, George Kern. "Previous attempts at creating Fast Ethernet switching fabrics by other vendors have failed to provide enough bandwidth for the Gig Uplink. I-Cube's solution provides a full Gigabit of bandwidth for each Gig link."

I-Cube Enables Gigabit Upgradable Workgroup Switches Today

The LS211 is a true full-duplex, 4.8 Gigabit switching fabric, implementing 48 full-duplex Fast Ethernet ports. Each port has a fixed, dedicated 100Mbit of full-duplex bandwidth.

The LS211 incorporates three features designed expressly to support Gigabit Uplinks. "Logical port ID's allow the LS211 to separate the concepts of physical and logical port identification," stated I-Cube's Vice President of Marketing Syed Ali. "Port Aggregation allows multiple physical ports to make up a single logical port. Additionally, dynamic load balancing allows traffic to be automatically distributed across the multiple physical ports making up the single logical port to maximize throughput."

By logically combining multiple ports and aggregating traffic across them, the LS211 is able to provide interfaces capable of supporting Gigabit Ethernet. The LS211 can be used as the switching fabric for 16 port to 28 port Fast Ethernet switches with 2 Gigabit Uplinks or 32 port to 38 port Fast Ethernet switches with 1 Gigabit Uplink.

A second switching product, the LS201 which implements 26 full-duplex, Fast Ethernet ports, can be used as the switching fabric for building 16 port switches with 1 Gigabit Uplink.

"Customers want to invest in an architecture that will support future network requirements. This means investing in a technology that is GbE upgradable. 100Mbit workgroup switches that provide uplinks to tie into emerging Gigabit backbones and servers are rapidly becoming a hot commodity," said Esmeralda Silva, research manager, LANs at International Data Corporation.

"The high cost associated with uplink transceivers has prevented many customers from making purchases until Gigabit backbones and servers are fully deployed. A 'Gigabit upgradable' workgroup technology, like I-Cube's LS211, is attractive because it helps system administrators to avoid paying a heavy upfront cost and allows them to invest in equipment today that will support their Gigabit networks tomorrow."

The LS211 is ready to support two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces today. All necessary signals can be brought up to two modular upgrade connectors. Future I-Cube devices will be able to use these interfaces to implement full Gigabit Ethernet ports. Using the LS211, system vendors can ship 16, 24 and 32 port Fast Ethernet switches with Gigabit Uplink upgradability today.

The LS211 Enables Full-Duplex Wire Speed, High Port Count Switches

The LS211 can also be used to construct 32, 40, and 48 port Fast Ethernet switches. Traditionally Fast Ethernet switches have been limited to 24 ports or less because of bandwidth limitations. The LS211 switching fabric has enough bandwidth to deliver full duplex wire-speed performance on every one of its 48 ports simultaneously.

No other Fast Ethernet switching fabric can deliver this level of performance. For the first time, Fast Ethernet system vendors can offer Fast Ethernet switching products at these high port counts.

I-Cube's LS SwitchSet utilizes proprietary crossbar technology, unlike other Fast Ethernet silicon vendors which utilize shared bus and shared memory architectures. No matter how many ports are implemented, I-Cube's crossbar architecture provides perfect, fixed, non-blocking bandwidth for every port.

The LS family is composed of the LS081 8 port crossbar switching fabric, the LS101 24 port crossbar switching fabric, the LS201 26 port crossbar switching fabric, the LS211 48 port crossbar switching fabric, the LS100 Quad port Fast Ethernet controller, and the LS105 Secondary Address Translation Cache.

Product Pricing and Availability

The LS SwitchSet is available now, while general sampling of the LS211 and the LS201 will commence in Q3 of this year. Fully managed or unmanaged, high performance 8, 12, 16, 24, 32, 40, and 48 port switches can be constructed from the LS SwitchSet today. Pricing in quantities of 1,000 units for the LS201 is $38.28 and for the LS211 is $68.89. The Raptor reference design is a 16 port, Full Duplex, Fast Ethernet per port switch available now and costs $5000.