NEC's BlueFire IP Routers and Switches

If we're ever going to get the opportunity to use such stuff as voice over IP and other fancy convergence capabilities, it's going to require a whole new infrastructure of wires, switches and other hardware that isn't quite in place yet. NEC is one of the companies who are cobbling together the necessary hardware and just let us know about its new BlueFire family of enterprise IP routers and switches, which implement IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) as well as IPv4 in hardware. The BlueFire IX5010 is a MultiService IP switch router that allows the integration of IP voice and data, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), Frame Relay (FR), Packet Over SONET (POS) and Gigabit Ethernet. It can be used to provide access for various WAN transport media like ATM and FR to Gigabit Ethernet LAN backbone or to consolidate legacy ATM and FR traffic for transport across a Gigabit Ethernet/IP WAN network. The BlueFire 700 IP switch series offers a variety of Layer 2/Layer 3 switch capacities with scalable fabrics ranging from 4 Gbps to 96 Gbps. NEC says it can accommodate small workgroups, intermediate-to-large enterprises, or corporate backbones. The BlueFire 700 IP switch series supports both Fast Ethernet (10/100) and Gigabit Ethernet data rates and processes packets at wire-speed. No word yet on pricing.