| The newly-announced Portswitch 900TP and Portswitch 900CP each contain
six internal LANs (notice now they're "configuration switches" now, not
"repeaters" ;^) ). The TP has 32 front-panel 10BaseT ports, while the
CP has 16 front-panel thinwire ports. Each also supports the usual
backplane thinwire segment as well as the docking station AUI port.
Per-port switching means that the ports can be randomly assigned to one
of the six internal LANs. Each of the six LANs can be connected (or
not) to an associated backplane flex channel in the DH900MS.
Ports mapped to the same LAN act as though they are attached to a
repeater independent from the other LANs. Thus the new products can
act as six independent repeaters attached to six different LAN
segments.
The customer is able to reconfigure the network to allocate bandwidth
and/or create workgroups competely via software such as Hubwatch,
without having to physically go to the hub and move wires.
Marc
P.S. The newly-announced Portswitch 900FP is a re-name job of the
DECrepeater 900FP 12-port fiber repeater. That product has always had
the ability to map front panel ports randomly to one of six flex
channels (in groups of two), so we re-named it for consistency.
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