D-Link, best known as a maker of networking gear for the consumer and small
office/home office (SOHO) sectors, is looking up-market.
At the Interop 2005 trade show in Las Vegas today, the company announced it
will launch three new switches for enterprise customers later this year.
The products — a 48-port offering and two 24-port models — will be sold
through resellers and distributors for between $2,999.99 and $4,299.99. The
price includes free technical support and firmware updates.
“The D-Link xStack 3200 series of switches are robust, enterprise-level
advanced business solutions that drive powerful infrastructure connectivity
for businesses from the SMB all the way up to the enterprise,” Steven Joe,
D-Link’s president and CEO, said in a statement.
The 10 GbE-capable switches feature enhanced security over previous D-Link
products. For example, they have signature-based attack detection for
threats previously handled by standalone firewalls or intrusion-detection
devices.
The switches incorporate built-in Access Control Lists (ACLs) to find and
filter Denial of Service
worms.
D-Link, which is based in Fountain Valley, Calif., also said the switches
are designed to help IT managers deal with networks that meld voice, video,
data and storage, making it easier to roll out new applications.
Pushing further into the enterprise switch market will put D-Link into even
greater competition with industry heavyweights, such as Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks
.
D-Link was founded in 1986 and has struck a number of deals to increase
distribution of its products, including last year’s pact
with AOL . The company is publicly traded on the Taiwan
stock exchange.
