Alcatel's proposal for 100-Mbps desktop connectivity was the least expensive of all the vendors' proposals for that scenario, both for powered ports, at $331,912, and for nonpowered ports, at $268,275. The company did not, however, provide pricing for 10 Gigabit ports, which could have had a significant impact on our price calculations.
Alcatel was the only vendor to offer built-in PoE support. This isn't a surprise when you consider that the company has had a leading VoIP solution for several years. One caveat: The PoE component was not based on the 802.3af standard, so in case we might decide to use another vendor's Ethernet phones down the road, we would need some assurance they would be compatible.
Unfortunately Alcatel didn't come up with a gigabit-to-the-desktop quote. We did follow up on this, and a spokesperson said the company is working on a stackable solution but couldn't provide any details. Another problem was that Alcatel was unable to deliver a 10 Gigabit interface. The company claimed that it has one planned for mid-2003 but said it was unable to give more specifics.
Like the competition, Alcatel was able to provide all the other features we sought, from route forwarding and QoS in ASICs to WAN connectivity to our remote building. It was the only vendor besides Enterasys that could do NAT in ASICs.
Alcatel proposed a core router and building aggregator switch with redundant management and power supplies. It also highlighted its support for VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol), 802.1w and 802.3ad, though it did not propose any redundancy in the network between the buildings and the core. Alcatel did discuss its "Smart Continuous Switching" feature, which it claims makes it possible to switch to a backup management module without any interruption to existing connections, including voice conversation. This sounded impressive.
Alcatel also appears to have mature centralized GUI management capabilities comparable to those of the other vendors, provided by its OmniVista applications. OmniVista was designed to do discovery and inventory of equipment, even gather serial numbers. The other vendors provide this capability as well, and it's a welcome feature for anyone who has tried to maintain a large inventory of switches for maintenance contracts. Unique to Alcatel's management platform was its ability to manage both voice and data, an advantage for companies that also own Alcatel's VoIP platform. If C2G's plans were delayed, it would want to reconsider Alcatel's offering in light of the company's plans to add 10 Gigabit support and more options for gigabit links later this year.
Peter Morrissey is a full-time faculty member of Syracuse University's School of Information Studies, and a contributing editor and columnist for Network Computing. Write to him at ppmorris@syr.edu.
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