Bay Networks System 5000 Family
- Bay 5000BH, the big brother of the centillions,
The Bay Networks System 5000 Family was born as an universal chassis for general purpose networking in the Synoptics labs about early 1992.
There are several different System 5000 Hubs in the filed. However, you should no more buy or use the 5000 hubs. These are totally out.
You may use the power supplies as spares, but that´s it. Hubs are definitely out. Keep your focus on the Bay 5000BH switches, all others are not worth to spend any time or money in it.
Beleave me, we did it in April 2003. We got a 5000 Ethernet hub with lots of 10 Mbit ports from California by accident and two 5000BH Token Ring chassis here in Germany. We did concentrate them to one chassis.
So the System 5000BH is the big brother of the Centillion 100 based on the Centillion ATM / Ethernet / Tokenring switch technology with a lot of unique features. Where the Centillion 100 port density was limited by its 6 slots, the 5000 chassis has 14 slots. And the 5000 BH chassis is really big.
The 5000BH version has the same components as the C100 family, but different board size and modules taken from the old Synoptics 5000 concept. It has two C100 ATM backplane busses with a total of 6.4 Gigabit instead of one and three big (but different) power supplies. It has the same software and all the same management tools, for example Bay´s easy to use speedview.
The unique feature of all Centillion 50/100/5000BH´s is, that you can connect two units back to back over the 155 or 622 Mbit ATM fiber line, but running Ethernet from one end to Ethernet on the other end.
There are SAR chips on all boards for the internal ATM backplane protocoll conversion from and to ATM. This should work for Ethernet and Token Ring we were told.
The process that segments a longer entity of data into 53 byte cells is called "segmentation and reassembly" (SAR). The data that goes into these cells comes from different native mode protocols, such as TCP/IP.
Bay´s feature, to locally convert Ethernet frames into ATM cells and back, done by a chip on each board in real time. Its a Bay native mode but it works.
On the right you see the work horses, the 5625 switch module is a 24 port 10/100 Ethernet module.
And you may plug in 12 boards of these that is 12 x 24 ports. But dont forget, the box becomes really hot and then you know, why there are two huge fans in the back, making a noise like an airplane.
As you see, the 5000BH (not the old Synoptics 5000 hubs in the almost same box) is a powerful big Centillion 100.
Ours has 4MB flash and 26MB Ram, one from our customer has had 32MB Ram. Thats good for Speedview 4.xx and 5.1 . We can live with it. It runs smooth.
If you like to connect your Hyperterminal to the 25 pin serial port, you must use a null-modem cable or a converter like the one on our left picture.
On the picture on the left, there are 2 adapters, a 25 to 9 pin, a 9 to 9 pin null modem adapter and on the very right side, this is the 9 pin end of our Cisco / Ascend serial control port cable to my workstation.
We will continue this shortly.