September 1997

ACACIA Brings Intelligence to Network Switching

When it comes to network-switching vendors, they all seem to have a stackable product.

ACACIA is the only vendor to give you a great ride on a separate 3.4 Gbps stacking bus, not just a 10BT or 100BT expansion port.

ACACIA unpiles your junk using TruStak, a NovaSwitch expansion module, to stack NovaSwitches together, creating a scalable, high-speed, full-mesh stack interconnect system. TruStak expands your networks in an orderly fashion so that they perform very well, with up to 9 Gbps system thruput.

Physical and Logical Views of TruStak’s Full-Mesh Architecture

Other switch interconnect methods use cascaded or cross-point-matrix mechanisms which prevent any-to-any communication and impact performance, while some other stacking methods require consumption of sparse high-speed uplinks to interconnect boxes. Not so, with NovaSwitches. This family works together.

NovaSwitches may be stacked up to seven units high for graceful, incremental growth from 16 to 280 switched ports per stack.

Each NovaSwitch contains three slots for expansion modules, which include 100 Mb, Gbit, and FDDI. This gradual network growth allows you to start small with a low-entry cost, and you pay only as your network grows. ACACIA offers the flexibility of a chassis-based product for the price of a stand-alone.

ACACIA’s NovaSwitches outperform the industry giants 3COM, Cisco, and Bay Networks in stacking interconnect bandwidth (3.4 Gbps) for wire speed, non-blocking communication, and switching bandwidth (2.56 Gbps). Another great feautre of NovaSwitch is its programmable DSP technology. That means that you get more for your money in 10/100 switching because it can be field upgradeable with new features or standards, such as IP switching, VLAN, Gigabit Ethernet, or even Web management. NovaSwitches also lead the competitors in remote managent with NovaWeb, which lets network managers control their switches from anywhere in the world with a standard web browser and embedded RMON.

ACACIA’s new qVLAN capability is also integrated into the NovaSwitch family.

qVLAN and NovaWeb 2.0 offer simple easy-to-use VLANs today, and can migrate to more robust IEEE 802.1q compliant VLANs as the standard is finalized. Acacia is the only company offering fully programmable LAN switches capable of being field- upgraded via software download, thereby bringing installed products into compliance with emerging standards such as VLAN and QoS (Quality of Service).

For additional information on these products contact us.