INDUSTRY

BRATISLAVA, SLOKIA -- Cisco Systems, the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet, today announced that SANET, Slovakia's Academic Network, had chosen Cisco's Catalyst® family as the switching platform to link its next-generation Ethernet network, SANET-2, to Slovak universities, research institutes and schools at gigabit speeds. This represents a major upgrade for the Slovak academic community, since the new network will be 10 to 100 times faster than the existing SANET backbone, to meet current and future demand for content rich services at high speed. The new SANET backbone will provide Slovakia's academic community with a solid platform for advanced educational tools, including distance learning, on-demand video services and multimedia. Marian Durkovic, chief of SANET's Technical Advisory Board, said: ``We were keen to go with Cisco not only because the Catalyst switches had the features and capacity we need, but also because of their potential as platforms for technologies like 10 Gigabit Ethernet, multi-protocol label switching or IP version 6. With Catalyst switches, we are able to build an end-to-end Ethernet infrastructure which provides SANET with gigabit IP network at the best cost/performance ratio.'' Via Cisco's Slovak system integrator, Business Global Systems a.s., SANET has signed a contract for 20 Catalyst® 6509 http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/si/casi/ca6000/ switches for its points of presence; a further ten Catalyst® 3500 http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/si/casi/ca3500xl/index.shtml series switches will act as signal regenerators around the network. Marcel Rebros, Cisco account manager for government and finance markets in Slovakia, said: ``As a non-profit organisation, it was crucial for SANET to maximise the value of their investment - and the Catalyst platform provided an ideal match in terms of features, scalability, robustness and flexibility.''