Nortel Unveils New Ethernet Switches

Nortel unveiled its Ethernet Routing Switch 5600 family, offering up to 18 times the stacking performance, up to twice the capacity, and up to seven-times the resiliency of the stackable switches from its primary competitors.


The five models in the Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 5600 family, which are suitable for deployment in the data center, as well as in the edge, distribution and core layers of the network, are stack-compatible with the existing ERS 5500 switches. The new models all come with integrated with 10 Gigabit uplink capacity. The 5600 also includes a model with support for up to 96 Gigabit power over Ethernet ports.




The Ethernet Routing Switch 5600 family offers a per-unit stacking capacity of 144 Gbps per switch and a total stacking backplane of 1.152 Tbps for a stack of eight units. Each of these stacked units provides at least two 10GbE XFP ports for high-performance
uplinks to the core or aggregation layers in the network. ERS 5698 models further provide high-density economical GbE connectivity with the added flexibility of up to 6 SFP ports per switch for gigabit fiber connections.


Nortel further said its Ethernet Routing Switch 5600s can also act as a virtual switch cluster to other ERS 2500, 4500 or even third party access switches using Nortel's switch clustering (SMLT) technology. ERS 5600s in this configuration can provide up to 800 ports and over 2.3 Terabits of performance while enabling full use of all switches and links across the network.


Advanced security features include Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP) snooping, Dynamic Address Resolution Protocol inspection, IP Source Guard and IGMP snooping.


The Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 5600 portfolio is generally available now.
http://www.nortel.com