March 4, 2003--SMC Networks (Irvine, CA), today announced that its managed and unmanaged switches were selected by the Portland public school district to deliver Fast Ethernet connectivity to classrooms and offices in the district's 107 facilities.
The TigerSwitch 6+2-port Gigabit fiber switches manage high-speed, high bandwidth connections from the multi-facility backbone to IDF closets in the district's schools, where they connect to the Gigabit uplinks on stacks of 24+2 port SMC TigerStack II 10/100 managed switches (SMC6624M) and 48+1 port TigerSwitch 10/100 (SMC-6750L2) switches. The switches then relay the connection to classrooms and offices, where SMC-EZ6508TX 8-port 10/100 switches distribute the connectivity to the desktop.
"We found SMC to be a good alternative to Cisco based on cost, reliability, and performance," said Scott Robinson, chief technology officer for the Portland public school district.
Steve Hufford, the district's technical operations manager, added, "We've been able to integrate Cisco and SMC equipment into our infrastructure, and the implementation of an SMC solution has allowed us to considerably lower our network equipment costs."
Tom Rizol, SMC's vice president of sales and marketing, said, "So far, the project has brought more than 7,000 Fast Ethernet connections to desktops in the district, and we look forward to continuing to work with Portland public schools as they expand and enhance the network and their use of it in the classrooms."
Each TigerSwitch 1000 (SMC8606SX) provides 8-ports of managed 1000BASE-SX backbone connectivity via its 6 fixed ports with two GBIC slots. Designed to handle heavy traffic workgroups and high-bandwidth applications, the switch is capable of reaching up to 16 Gbits/sec with a non-blocking switching architecture. Its management features include port trunking, VLAN, Generic VLAN Registration Protocol (GVRP), and priority queuing for consistently reliable operation.
Closer to the classroom, TigerStack II 10/100 and TigerSwitch 10/100 managed switches support auto-MDIX 10/100 connections with a non-blocking switch fabric of 9.6 Gbits/sec and 13.6 Gbits/sec, respectively. Portland public school district used one of each unit's expansion slots for Gigabit fiber uplink to the SMC8606SX. TigerStack II provides the traffic security and network bandwidth efficiency that classroom connectivity demands, and its integrated Web-based management configuration system makes it easy to install and use. SMC-EZ6508TX EZ Hub 10/100 auto-sensing, dual-speed switches are used for desktop connectivity distribution.