Radware: Alteon is Back

Michael McNamara — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 17:00:09 +0000

Radware acquired the Alteon product line from Nortel back in the first half of 2009. Radware has put together a very interesting marketing plan to rebuild the Alteon brand and announce their first new product out of that acquisition.

I’ve used the legacy Alteon ACE Director 4 and Nortel Application Switch 2216 which are both very solid products. The first wire speed router I ever worked with was a RND (Radware) router back in 1992. It will be interesting to see how folks receive the Radware announcement and if existing Nortel/Alteon customers stay with Radware. I currently have two Nortel Application Switch 2216s that are under maintenance from Radware. I just never have any problems with the 2216, so I have never had to contact Radware support.

Here are some specs for the new hardware;

Available Throughput Licenses

8 Gbps, 12 Gbps, 16 Gbps and 20 Gbps scalable throughput licenses

Non-blocking Switch Fabric

400 Gbps

Layer 2 Switching

Wire-speed

Routing Protocols

OSPF, RIP, RIP II, BGP

Processor

2 AMD Shanghai quad-core 2.5 GHz

Memory

Up to 32GB

Gigabit/GBIC Ports

4 10 Gigabit Fiber Ports (XFP pluggable optics) +
4 Gigabit Fiber Ports (SFP-GBIC Mini) +
8 Gigabit Ethernet Ports (Copper)

1000Base-SX/LX/ZX Ports

All Gigabit Fiber ports deliver SX/LX/ZX interfaces depending on GBIC

1000Base-SX (850 nm) Operating Distance

62.5 micron MM fiber .2 m to 275 m
50 micron MM fiber .2 m to 550 m

1000Base-LX/ZX Operating Distance

LX: Up to 10 km (6.2 mi)
ZX: Up to 80 km (49.7 mi)

You can find the data sheet for the Radware Alteon 5412 here.

Cheers!