Asante Technologies, Inc. and Proactive Technologies have teamed up to provide the digital prepress and media industries with affordable, reliable Gigabit switches. Working together for the past six months, the companies sell Gigabit solutions to hundreds of users at dozens of locations.

"Asante has the switches of choice for the graphics market," said Pat Taylor, president of Proactive Technologies. "We supply products to customers that operate multi-million dollar presses running around the clock. Downtime is very expensive. We needed to get a good price on networking equipment, without sacrificing performance. Asante had the vision to make Gig affordable right now."

Named one of CRN's Top 25 Rising Stars for 2003, Proactive's strong revenue growth is based on providing the right pre-configured solutions to their prepress customers. These include storage, servers, and backup technologies—but networking is key. "You can load up on server horsepower and spend a lot on storage and I/O systems," commented Taylor, "but you must have the pipes to move big files fast to realize a return on investment. Our customers in the printing and publishing worlds have very demanding issues. They regularly move 500 megabyte to 2 Gigabyte files."

Proactive's clients typically have a Windows-based infrastructure that feeds Windows-based infrastructure and Mac machines on the creative side. Proactive purchased IntraCore 35160-T Layer 2 switches at "20% of the price of our former supplier," commented Taylor. "Plus, we have seen a 3-4-fold performance increase with the new Asante switches." The IC35160-T has 12 ports of 10/100/1000BaseT and 4 dual-function ports of GBIC/1000BaseT copper. By using a single-chip state-of-the-art architecture with shared memory, wire-speed switching at Layer 2 is achieved on all ports.

"Our next move will be to Asante's IntraCore 35516 Layer 3 switches," said Taylor.
"Customers will need switches like these for new technologies such as iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface)."

The IC35516 switches feature 16 non-blocking Gigabit Ethernet ports, wire-speed routing, the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) router protocol, multicast routing, 8 hardware-level priority queues, 4000 Virtual LANs (VLANs), double 802.1q VLAN tagging, 2000 multicast groups, and 16,000 routing tables.

"Many people are under the misconception that they can't afford Gig," continued Taylor. "We want to change this. The key missing element in their current infrastructure is the switch. By investing a few thousand dollars in the appropriate Gig solution, they'll see an immediate improvement and better ROI."

For more information, visit [url=http://www.asante.com]http://www.asante.com[/url] or [url=http://www.proactivetechnologies.com]http://www.proactivetechnologies.com[/url].

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