16 July 2003 Irving, TX Lightwave -- NEC America Inc. (NEC) recently unveiled the BlueFire 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10-GbE) card, which enables the company's BlueFire 740 and 750 LAN backbone switches to consolidate network capacity. The card helps organizations improve network utilization efficiency and reduce the amount of fiber-optic infrastructure required.
The new 10-GbE card also allows organizations to take advantage of existing dark fiber within metropolitan Ethernet environments for high-speed traffic aggregation and transport within a campus or metropolitan area. Enterprises can now connect multiple high-traffic systems with a single port instead of using multiple GbE trunks. Internet Service Providers, for example, can more efficiently consolidate inter-nodal Internet traffic among their exchanges.
The BlueFire 10 GbE card also facilitates broadband communications among nodes in shared processing, multiple computer environments. "Large research and development organizations that employ multiple high-performance computing require extremely fast communications to achieve maximum processing effectiveness," reports Mikio Imokawa, network technology vice president for NEC America's IP Network Division (IPND). "Together, the BlueFire 10 GbE interface and the non-blocking architecture of the BlueFire 740 and 750 Ethernet switches helps to cost-effectively provide the connectivity and efficiency these organizations need."
"We can provide 10-GbE capability to our customers' existing BlueFire backbone switches with a simple upgrade," adds John Stafford, assistant general manager of NEC's IPND. "This means users can implement 10-GbE capability into their current network without having to purchase a new chassis while enjoying the redundancy and high-performance features of their BlueFire 740 and 750 switches." U
The BlueFire 740 and 750 are Layer 2/3 Ethernet switches with hardware-based Quality ofIService (QoS) providing multiple levels of traffic prioritization for converged networking. Both support IPv4 and IPv6 in hardware with two-way tunneling and translation.