Some background about the Centillion series, the company and the product development from our view.

This will be one of the most interesting pages of this web working with superiour Bay Networks and Nortel switching products. During our research in the internet for any hints and tricks to get a MCP working again, I found a lot of documentation from earlier law suites against the Bay Network company and some bosses from the management, when the merger 1994 from wellfleet and synoptics to Bay Networks has happened.

Then I did get in contact with people from older Bay Germany operations, listening to their stories what happened during their Bay time.

Inside the web based documents, there we did find a lot af explanations about the problems inside the new company, pressing out a new product "in time" or loosing a complete market.

When we did buy lowcost C100 Ethernet boards in the US, there was a production date from "week 02 in year 2000" on a "10 MBit RJ45 - 16 port Ethernet" printed on the lable.

That means, when 98% of all suppliers of Network equipment did stop production of 10 MBit in 1998, Nortel did continue production of unsellable boards. I got 5 of them, brand new ones, for 95.- dollars !! all five.

Reading all these documents, i found a lot of information about that period of dreams to take over a market, unreal plans and at the end beeing a looser with really good products. Here you see one of my intentions, to work on this web.

What i have seen as products was excellent.  May be the sales people could not handle that or they have been late on the market.

Inside the products, there are labels like Centillion Inc. and others from Bay Networks Inc. , some from NEC and now from Nortel Inc. .

We know, that the Centillion 1000 Series was produced from NEC Japan, saving an extraordinary level of quality, never seen before in the computer business. This was a suprise.

We will collect company and product informations here, receiving from the net.
 
one of the impressive press infos from 1997

BAY NETWORKS ANNOUNCES in December 1, 1997
The new ATM WAN ACCESS Switch.
-
Bay Networks announced two ATM access concentrators and two ATM Media Dependent Adapter (MDA) switch modules for its Centillion 100 and System 5000/5005BH switch platforms. The MX200 access concentrator, which is available in 12-slot or 16-slot configurations, supports channelized T1/E1, T3/E3, OC-3c, and a variety of serial interfaces. The MX50 is a four-slot ATM access concentrator designed for regional and branch office environments. Both products offer advanced traffic-shaping and an Adaptive Queue Management algorithm. Bay Networks' ATM Media Dependent Adapter (MDA) switch modules accept either one or two 2-port daughter card MDAs to offer a total of four switch ports. The MDA daughter cards provide media support via multi-mode fiber, single-mode fiber, and unshielded twisted pair (UTP) interfaces. (http://www.baynetworks.com)
Bay Networks, December 1, 1997

a press info from an unknown magazine.

While the product of a merger that occurred nearly three years ago, Bay Networks appears to still be defining itself as a unified company in the fiercely competitive networking industry. Bay was formed by the October 1994 merger of SynOptics Communications, a leading supplier of intelligent hubs, and Wellfleet Communications, a major manufacturer of internetworking products. Since then, Bay has made a number of small acquisitions, and now offers a full line of products for high-performance networks, including intelligent hubs, routers, local area network switches, remote and Internet access solutions and sophisticated management software. Similarly, the networking industry as a whole has been consolidating as  participants   seek to better compete against the broad solutions-based product offerings of market leader Cisco Systems.

In 1996, BAY made several small acquisitions. It acquired privately-held NetICs Inc., a maker of high-performance Fast Ethernet switches; the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) modem business of Penril Datability Networks; LANcity Corp., a leading vendor of cable modem technology; Tel Aviv-based Armon Networking, a global provider of RMON-based distribution analysis tools and multi-segment LAN probes;
and Performance Technology, Inc., a leader in LAN-to-Internet access for small and medium offices. Its larger acquisitions during 1995 included: Xylogics, Inc., a provider of remote access products for corporate networks, in exchange for 8.4 million common shares; and Centillion Networks, Inc., a leading provider of Token Ring switching products, in exchange for 5.9 million (adjusted) common shares.

This page will be filled step by step with no stress. If you have any suggestion, if you did find any interesting and/or valuable link, give me an e-mail.

Migrating from a Bay Networks LattisCell ATM Environment to Bay Networks Centillion ATM LANE :
http://q.qut.edu.au/atm/c100migr.html
http://q.qut.edu.au/atm/stage2-4.html

(from August 2002)  This link goes directly to the
Home > Forums > Communications Rack > Networking Bay (Nortel) Networks: Switches Forum
http://www.tek-tips.com/gthreadminder.cfm/lev2/8/lev3/58/pid/550

if you like to search yourself - try:
http://www.tek-tips.com/gforumsearch2.cfm

try to search for "Bay Networks"
Dont visit www.nortelfaq.com, nothing was updated since a long time.

We are starting this FAQ page. Later on it will be a self running data base or forum and you can type in your topics and solutions yourself.

Could you confirm please if the Centillion switches and their management software are in any way dependant on compliance with the new Euro symbol.

Absolutely no !

A switch (and a router) should be and must be absolutely transparent for transporting data of any kind. The admin- and/or config- programs are working on a plain ascii basis.


Question : I have 10 Centillion 100's (5 100 port + 5 80 port) I have them all
interconnected physically via the ATMSpeed 155 ports. I am completley new to
ATM and cannot work out how to setup the PVC's / SPVC's correctly.
--------------------
Answer : You need to learn much about ATM, there are some documents on
www.bayswitches.com/downloads/documentation.htm
search for "atm ethernet gigabit"
load :
ATM vs Gigabit Ethernet: A Technical Perspective
ATM vs Gigabit Ethernet: A Business Perspective
- both are from Nortel, it is not everything true there, but it helps to understand, that you cannot interconnect the C100´s with ATM, but running ethernet over the other ports.
That does not work, cannot work !
If you use the ATM 155 fiber ports, you must use the lan emulation (LANE) for ethernet, loosing a lot of bandwidth.

Question : So I cannot use the ATM ports to create an ATM backbone interlinking the C100's ? -  If this is the case how do I interlink them ATM Router or the ethernet ports ?

Answer : If I do understand your needs right, you like to use Ethernet PC´s and Servers and
you like to interconnect the C100´s over ATM fiber.

That does not work.

If you transport ATM packets over the network, they will not be convertet to Ethernet packets like on a Cisco Router.-
We use 7505 Cisco´s to come from the ATM backbone, having a 155 MBit ATM Adapter on that side, have another 10/100 MBit Adapter in this router and getting Ethernet out.

    Bay Networks Centillion 50/100
    Bay Networks 5000BH(c)
    (Centillion 1200 not supported)
    Bay Networks Centillion 1400
    Bay Networks Centillion 1600
    Accelar 1100
    Accelar 1150
    Accelar 1200

Currently we dont have any Bay 5000BH nor we have any C1200. Therefore we cannot examine, what we are writing here.

It seems, that we will get a lot of equipment in April 2003.
Look to the products pages. On these pages are some basic information and the info will be continued step by step.

Thats all we have had in the past.