The GLX4000 series physical layer switch is the latest addition to Curtiss-Wright's comprehensive family of LinkXchange products.

Available now from Mistral Solutions, the GLX4000 series physical layer switch is the latest addition to Curtiss-Wright's comprehensive family of LinkXchange products. The GLX4000 is a nonblocking, crossbar switch that enables a wide variety of input signals to be connected to any of its 288 output ports and comes equipped with hot-swappable power supplies, fans and port cards. This network related product is aimed at providing a cost effective solution for connecting a set of high precision equipments to multiple systems that need to be monitored, tested or validated.

They can find extensive use in a manufacturing line where different products manufactured can be tested for various parameters through switching them to measuring equipments connected through the GLX4000 switches.

The target users could be electronic component manufacturers, electronic finished goods manufacturers, research and development laboratories with a centralised test and measurement facility connecting to various 'systems or units under test'.

The GLX4000 provides network designers with extensive flexibility and power.

It enables all devices to be connected 'under test', after which all topology changes or fault tests can be made through the GUI and CLI.

Automating the wiring and configuration process can help eliminate human errors and greatly increase the accuracy of the network topology.

Cost savings can also be realised as the GLX4000 supports the sharing of expensive resources such as analysers, sniffers or data recorders.

These resources can be connected to the switch and shared among all users and departments.

The system chassis can accommodate up to six hot-swappable 48-port interface blades configured to support SFP or FireWire (1394b) at speeds up to 4.25Gbit/s and can also be configured to accept direct FireWire connections at rates of up to 1600Mbit/s.

Software support for the switch includes Curtiss-Wright's LXplorer GUI software for switch configuration management and allows the user to monitor the health of the switch chassis and port cards.

Additional software support includes the GLX4000 Linux operating system, controlling firmware and nonvolatile port configuration data, all of which reside on the module.