Officials at Lockheed Martin Federal Systems in Manassas, Va., needed a switch for the sonar subsystem in U.S. Navy New Attack Submarine that would provide network reconfigurability. The Fiberxpress Network Transparent Switch (NTS) from Systran Corp. in Dayton, Ohio, provided their solution.
The NTS works because "the switch is transparent to Fibrechannel protocol," says Van Townsend, senior engineer at Lockheed Martin Federal systems. "The NTS behaves like a automated fiber path panel. It reconfigures the fiber cable plant."
The switch enables Lockheed Martin engineers to maintain a high bandwidth and a simple topology while adding the ability to reconfigure system fault tolerance and processing resource reallocation, continues Townsend.
Features of the Systran switch include as many as 32 non-blocking Fibrechannel or optical ports via eight media-specific port cards; automatic bypass of inactive ports; configuration of point-to-point, arbitrated loop or broadcast communication links; configuration of network topology; remote location control; a cascading capability that connects multiple NTS units together; support for other types of networks; and a chassis that will fit into any enclosure that accommodates four 5 1/4-inch half-height disk drives. - J.M.
For more information on the Network transparent Switch or Systran phone 1-800-252-5601, mail to 4126 Linden Avenue, Dayton, Ohio, 45432-3068, e-mail at [email protected], or check out the company web site at http://www.systran.com.