3Com Corporation Demonstrates Highest Throughput for Fast Ethernet Traffic Over ATM OC-12c Backbones in Tests Conducted by The Tolly Group

Business Wire, June 2, 1998

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 2, 1998--3Com Corporation (NASDAQ:COMS) today announced results from independent testing to reinforce 3Com's technology leadership for Fast Ethernet/ATM integration and performance. Results of the Fast Ethernet/ATM integration test, certified by The Tolly Group, prove that 3Com's CoreBuilder(tm) 7000 HD high-function switch delivers consistently scalable throughput from Fast Ethernet into an ATM OC-12c (622 Mbps) backbone network and offers the highest performance ever certified in a test of this nature.

In today's market, 10 Mbps Ethernet switching at the edge of an ATM network is not good enough for many customers. ATM-based campus backbone and metropolitan area networks require high-density Fast Ethernet, and even Gigabit Ethernet, switching into the ATM backbone with maximum performance in a fashion that takes full advantage of ATM's resiliency features over multiple OC-12c links. In this way, customers can continue to benefit from ATM's outstanding support for large scale, high-availability networking and high-quality convergence for voice, video and data, without compromising the performance of high-speed LAN-attached servers, routers and workgroups.

"The Fast Ethernet-to-ATM test results showed that 3Com's CoreBuilder 7000 HD switch delivers scalable switch-to-switch layer 2 Fast Ethernet throughput up to 3.5 Gbps across four OC-12c links with switch-to-switch link redundancy," said Kevin Tolly, president and CEO of The Tolly Group. "3Com has shown the highest performance ever certified by The Tolly Group in a test of this nature with Fast Ethernet and OC-12c."

Details of the test results can be found at http://www.tolly.com. See document number 8281.

"No other vendor has been able to demonstrate this level of throughput for Fast Ethernet into OC-12c that 3Com has proven in this certified test," said Nachman Shelef, vice president and general manager in 3Com's Enterprise Business Unit. "While some other vendors struggle to achieve good performance for 10 Mbps Ethernet into an ATM backbone, 3Com has accelerated well beyond this, as required in today's high-speed backbone market"

3Com's leadership in providing Fast Ethernet/ATM integration for customers is longstanding and unsurpassed. "Many of our competitors still do not even offer ATM edge switching configurations allowing for multiple Fast Ethernets into multiple OC-12's. Those that can are very expensive, offer limited density and do not support dynamic load- balancing" Shelef added. The Fast Ethernet switching option for the CoreBuilder 7000 HD switch is currently shipping and in production use by many hundreds of 3Com customers.

Test Confirms Delivery on Promises

In The Tolly Group test conducted recently, 3Com demonstrated 48 Fast Ethernet full-duplex ports split between two CoreBuilder 7000 HD switches operating across four dynamically load-sharing OC-12c links, each running at very close to the maximum theoretical capacity, allowing for SONET/SDH and ATM cell overhead. The test data revealed bi-directional throughput of 5.24 million frames per second with 64-byte Fast Ethernet frames -- employing over 92% of the ATM OC-12c's usable bandwidth for the frame size. With 1,518-byte frames, the CoreBuilder 7000 HD switch delivered scaleable Fast Ethernet/ATM integration of over 2.3 million frames per second across four OC-12c links.

3Com also demonstrated the capability of the switches to recover from the failure of one or more of the OC-12c links in the backbone. Moreover, 3Com demonstrated wire-speed performance for multiple Fast Ethernet links into a single OC-12c backbone. All the tests were conducted with the CoreBuilder 7000 HD switches supporting ATM Forum industry specifications. In addition to the use of two ATM OC-12c interface modules providing two ports each, the switches were each configured with two 16-port CoreBuilder 7600 Fast Ethernet switch modules, which utilize 3Com's revolutionary ZipChip ASICs for high-speed translation Fast Ethernet into the ATM format.

Anchorage Accord Compliant

In related news, the CoreBuilder 7000 HD switch now supports the key specifications contained in the ATM Forum mandate known as the Anchorage Accord, named after the city where it was approved. The specifications include LAN Emulation (LANE) 2.0, User Network Interface (UNI) 4.0, Integrated Layer Management Interface (ILMI) 4.0, Traffic Management (TM) 4.0 and Private Network Node Interface (PNNI) 1.0. They are defined as the foundation for building robust and scaleable ATM networks. The specifications are designed to be backward compatible with future versions.

7800 Module for the CoreBuilder 7000 High-function Switch

The new CoreBuilder 7800 Gigabit Ethernet module for 3Com's CoreBuilder 7000 high-function switch is the only product on the market today that offers high-speed integration of switched Gigabit Ethernet data-oriented, building backbones, and multi-service ATM enterprise backbones. Also, 3Com was the first to demonstrate an ATM OC-12c-to-Gigabit Ethernet network publicly. The 7800 module provides four Gigabit Ethernet ports, each with dedicated ZipChip ASICs for high-performance, packet-to-cell conversion.