DOE chooses Lucent ATM switch

Electronic News, Sept 22, 1997 by Gale B. Morrison

Murray Hill, N.J.--Lucent Technologies Microelectronics is providing its new core ATM switch to the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories for their voice and data networking applications.

The new carrier-class switch, the GlobeView 2000, release 2, is designed for the core of the public network, Lucent said, and provides faster connections, greater bandwidth options, more capacity and even higher reliability. The scaleable 20 gigabits per second switch also includes traffic management capabilities to support emerging data services, the company said.

The switch will be the core of Sandia's data network and will connect engineering, scientific, and internal World Wide Web data. It will also serve as a gateway to Sandia's external network, enabling Internet access for the company's employees.

The GlobeView-2000 also will link five ESS-2000 switches in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., enabling Sandia to use a single, dedicated high-speed link for voice and data traffic.

The links are presumably to the DoE's other national laboratories in those cities. Some of the information travelling through the new switch would therefore be the extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) research the three labs will conduct in partnership with AMD, Motorola and Intel (EN, Sept. 15).

"We needed a highly reliable ATM switch with capacity to grow and to integrate with the public network," Dan Hartley, VP for laboratory development at Sandia National Labs. "The GlobeView-2000, release 2 fits the bill by helping Sandia realize its productivity vision by combining 'supercomputer' performance capabilities and voice/data networking convergence through scaleable, easy-to-manage, carrier-class ATM technology."

The next-generation GlobeView has been field-tested and features redundant software and hardware; line-card speeds transmitting 622 megabits per second; hundreds of switched virtual circuits that are designed to enable service providers to set up and tear down ATM circuits in real time; higher density components than the company's previus devices, and lower power requirements that enable the switch to occupy 50 percent less space than previous models.

"Soft" permanent virtual circuits in the switch's architecture help ensure network reliability by automatically rerouting traffic around network failures at the rate of 100 connections per second. The switch is part of a portfolio of data networking products from Lucent, spanning data communications for customer network equipment through the core of the public network.

Although it is deployed with more than 30 service provider customers in nine countries, the GlobeView-2000 will not be generally available until 2Q98. Pricing was not available at press time.