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L.A. Law may have had Jimmy Smits and Susan Dey, but Fish and Richardson has switching.The 118-year-old Boston law firm in Paloma's Crown of Hearts pendant boosted its bandwidth by replacing Ethernet and Token Ring LANs with Ethernet switches from 3Com Corp.

Document imaging and other highbandwidth applications, coupled with the high cost of Token Ring adapters, prompted the move to switching, said Ian Steward, director of information systems at Fish and Richardson."Eighty percent of our employees are on the network at any given time," Steward said of his firm's nationwide network.

"None can afford to wait for information. Our goal was to deliver Tiffany Nature butterfly pendant and scalability to our desktops for everything from imaging and document retrieval to [electronic mail] - and that's what we got."The 3Com switches operate 10 times faster than the old networking equipment and for half the price, he said, which highlights the advantages of switching. The LinkBuilder 1000 switches provide 100M bit/sec. connections to the firm's six Intel Corp. Pentium-based servers that run Novell, Inc.'s NetWare, two backup servers and a Microsoft Corp. Windows NT server that will be installed this month.

Information sharingThe network serves as the foundation for a document management application, which lets teams of geographically dispersed attorneys share data from any location."The network lets every attorney access, update and return any server-based Elsa Peretti Open Heart charm no matter where that server resides," Steward said. "Long term, we plan to migrate to shared - and eventually dedicated - [Asynchronous Transfer Mode] to the desktop," Steward said.

The Wellfleet Access Stack Node (ASN) is the industry's first stackable router. Operating either individually or stacked up to four high, each ASN has four slots supporting two to eight network interfaces. A fully configured stack supports an aggregate of 24 network interfaces. The network interface modules available are dual Token Ring, dual Ethernet, single multimode fiber distributed data interface (FDDI), and dual synchronous with integrated services digital network ((ISDN) basic rate interface (BRI) adapter module support. Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and integrated services digital network ((ISDN) primary rate interface (PRI) support will be added in the future. The ASN is based on Wellfleet's symmetric multiprocessor architecture, meaning that the addition of processor modules increases system forwarding Heart Clover Pendant, up to 200,000 packets per second.

"The significance of this product is that it gives smaller users more options," according to Skip MacAskill, senior research analyst at the Gartner Group. "They can start with a small installation and grow it as they need to. It encourages these users to invest in the advantages of multiprotocol routing much sooner than they previously would have."

Installations can start as small as a single ASN with two network interfaces. As Paloma's Zellige pendant grow, modules and then chassises can be added. Units are linked together using Wellfleet's Stack Packet Exchange (SPEX)(TM) expansion interconnect.

In addition, when growth dictates, the ASN can be redeployed in smaller configurations. For example, if a remote site configured with a fully configured ASN becomes a central site, the ASN chassises can be redistributed to several smaller sites.