Basic information about the ESX- switch family

Professional Enterprise and Backbone Switches

ESX-2400 and ESX-4800
Multi-Gigabit Routing Switches
Currently we have no information about the ideas and plans behind the research and development of the modular concept of the ESX family, we try to explain some topics what we did find out. If you have any infomation or documentation from the ESX family, what is not published, we would be glad to receive it.

The ESX switch family seems to be designed from professional experts (gurus) at Berkeley. Currently we have no information where these guys came from.

We from RDE did find a lot of features, we did learn at the German Technical University of Darmstadt too:
It must be modular and it must be state of the art. We did open all units comming in and taking pictures and did compare the different stages of development.
Furthermore we did look to the pages of the semiconductor companies for the specs of the chips, looking what they say, comparing all available information. What the chip cannot do, the board and the unit cannot do. So the unit cannot do more than the manufacturer of the ASIC or the CPU did specify.

First of all, you must understand that a switch is not a switch We have seen Taiwan or Korean 48 port 10/100Mbit/s switches for less than 600 dollars. The small Fore/Marconi ESX-2400 did range between 9000.- and 18000.- dollars. The ESX-4800 did range from 50.ooo to 140.ooo dollars. And there is a huge difference between those products.
Here in Wiesbaden we have some HP 4000M switches and they did work well. But after some delay problems we did measure, that there is a minumum loss of about 7% bandwidth from a DEC nic to another DEC nic. And if we cascade two or more switches, we loose more than 7% + 7% +7%. We did loose about 28% bandwidth.
So we cannot agree with wirespeed - and HP did not talk about wirespeed of the 4000M series.

Some knowledge about the switch fabric and how it looks like and whats the difference between the 2400 and 4800 series. The broschures dont talk about that.

Some knowledge about the modularity of the whole concept, some pictures what modules are in the market.

We got all informations about the Lucent power supply with its 4 units built into the ESX 4800. It is published within this web, it is really good to know, what they did and why.

The last available Marconi ESX 2400 / 4800 data sheet dates from Feb. 2001. The last Fore Systems data sheet dates from April 1999.

In our PDF Database, we have added more and more Ascend, Lucent, Berkeley and Fore documentation and manuals.

Here are some prices taken from some of the last public messages from Fore in Jan 1999:

The EDSA is included in the ForeThought internetworking software, which is bundled with the ESX switch. The 2400 starts $29,995 and the 4800 starts at $45,490.

As we found out, it is the mini version of a swith. A fully equipped 4800 was more than $150.000.

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