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For Mentor, the new net has brought much-needed relief. "The bottom line is that instead of having 20 screaming engineers on a routed subnet, we can give 50to 60 engineers on different subnets switched access to a centralized set of net resources," Thomsen said.SynOptics Communications, Inc. last week rolled out its next-generation Lattis System 5000 hub, a multigigabit-capacity device that combines switching capabilities with distributed management to serve as a control point for collapsed backbones.

The 5000 is at the heart of a new star-of-stars topology, dubbed structured networking, being touted by SynOptics. The 5000 will sit in the center of a network interconnecting work group and departmental hubs throughout a campus via switching. The hub will also act as a Return to Tiffany Oval tag ring control platform that allows an administrator to oversee an entire net by pulling management and traffic analysis data from all connected devices.

"The 5000 is a hub of hubs that brings different technologies together and makes them work in Tiffany 1837 concave ring," said Andrew Ludwick, president and chief executive officer of SynOptics. "By tightly integrating net management into the device, users get better control over their networks."The hub is a 14-slot device that supports as many as 52 Ethernet, 26 tokenring or five Fiber Distributed Data Interface network segments across a three-tiered backplane. One slot is reserved for a management module.

The hub provides 12G bit/sec of aggregate capacity when all three backplanes are fully utilized. One backplane supports 12 Ethernets and nine token rings, as well as the common management bus, which is used to control the 5000 and connected devices.

A separate FDDI backplane supports five FDDI rings, and the third Tiffany 1837 ring is divided into a 10G bit/sec portion that can support two of SynOptics' FastMatrix Asynchronous Transfer Mode switch modules, and a 2G bit/sec segment for fast frame switching modules for technologies such as 100M bit/sec Ethernet. The modules that can take advantage of the third backplane will be part of a future release.

The 5000 is made to link LattisNet System 3000 and 2000 hubs in work group and departmental local-area networks throughout a campus net. To facilitate those connections, SynOptics rolled out new cluster modules that support fiber downlinks from the hubs.The modules come in Ethernet and token-ring versions. The Ethernet model can support as many as four 3000s or 2000s so the hub can provide connectivity for as many as 52 Ethernet segments when fully configured with cluster modules.

For each of the four hub connections, the cluster module also offers four copper-based ports that can provide connectivity to a centrally located server cluster or a local Ethernet segment.The token-ring cluster module offers connectivity for up to two 3000s or 2000s--for a maximum of 26 token rings--as well as four copper-based ports for each of the hub connections.The hub supports distributed Simple Network Management Protocolbased capabilities Tiffany Notes ring Data Collection Engines (DCE), which are multiprocessing daughterboards for the Ethernet and token-ring management modules that can deliver traffic analysis and problem resolution information.

In conjunction with the 5000 rollout, SynOptics introduced a new Tiffany Natural Rose Ring of its management software, Optivity 4.0, which provides virtual network capabilities and will be initially available on SunConnect's SunNet Manager. It allows net managers to group devices linked to the 5000, including those indirectly connected to other hubs, into logical groups.If a user needs access to two servers on separate LANs in different buildings, for example, an administrator can logically assign that person to both LANs.