The Ether-Raptor line of switches from Raptor Networks Technology provide from 1 to 10GB layer 2/3/4 connectivity for the corporate backbone.

According to information provided by the vendor, the switches achieve true wire-speed via their proprietary "RAST" (Raptor Adaptive Switch Technology), a technology that allows multiple switches to be automatically aware of and link to one another at the core level, forming a switch fabric in which multiple physical switches can operate as a single logical switch for the network. Because of this automatic awareness, says Raptor, network latency is reduced as individual packets can be identified and forwarded in a more direct fashion to their intended ports at the core level of the switch; i.e., the entire store-and-forward process of the switching mechanism needn't be repeated at each physical switch. Other RAST advantages touted by the vendor include the ability to manage all switches in the fabric from a central location, with each switch able to serve as an automatic "backup" should the initially designated "master" switch go down.

The modular design of the switches allows for field replaceable power supplies, logic cards and cable personality modules (supporting both fibre and copper), as well as ports, power, and bandwidth upgrades. The switch technology additionally allows for long distnce implementations, where individual switches can be separated by up to 10 km and still support full functionality (the vendor notes that most features are still available at distances of up to 40 km).

The product line currently consists of the ER 1010, which supports up to 6 10-GigE optical ports and 24 1-GigE ports; and the ER 1808, with 8 10 GigE ports. Up to 16 switches can be internetworked to appear as a single logical switch; with the vendor noting upcoming support for up to 64 switches in a cluster ("soon").

New to the Ether-Raptor offerings is an update to the platform's base operating system, RaptorWare. Improvements in the software include enhanced Quality of Service (class of service Queue mapping, color aware QoS) and differential services (enhanced QoS and COS mapping, L2 and L3/L4 ACL integration, and per-port egress rate limiting), enhanced routing features (IP multi-netting, proxy ARP, and traceroute), enhanced switching (IGMPv3 snooping per VLAN), port mirroring (many-to-many and many-to-one, port security), static multicast streams, full IP multicast protocol suite, Web management, and full SNMP support.

The Ether-Raptor switches are available now. Street pricing for a typical configuration is about $25,000 for the ER-1010 and about $45,000 for the 1808.

Contact Raptor Network Technology for further information.

product submission by EITPlanet Staff

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