The OmniSwitch 9000 has a throughput of more than 570 Mpps and a 768 Gbps switching rate over a 1.92 TBps backplane. Its port density is average -- the 9800 has 348 ports at Gigabit Ethernet rates -- but although some 10 Gigabit vendors have been touting higher and higher port densities, it may be "a little bit of a red herring" because few customers need such high density numbers, said Schuchart. In the case of the 9000 line, he believes its density will probably get better in the future. But right now, it's the software that makes the difference.

"From a software standpoint, Alcatel has always had a very good security focus and a very good manageability focus. They've got a good focus on QoS," explained Schuchart, noting that those three points continue to hold true in the OmniSwitch 9000 family.

Guillaume Ivaldi, product line manager for the OmniSwitch 9000, said security is done via port-based authentication; there's also a quarantine manager for isolating potential network threats. The switches come with a Web-based management console and have a smart networking interface with smart forwarding features. Centralized management is available through Alcatel's OmniVista console as well.

"At this point, we're talking about routing, tunneling, and full QoS and filtering on IPv6, in addition to IPv4," Ivaldi said, adding that the switches also support most current multicast routing protocols. Multicast support becomes critical as companies adopt more video, real-time collaboration, and storage applications that affect traffic and bandwidth distribution.

Indeed, much of 10 Gig's value to the enterprise comes in the form of handling bandwidth-heavy applications that often run in the background, noted Schuchart.