Abstract

Tolly Group Report #202141 (August 2002) verifies that NEC’s BlueFire 720 and BlueFire 740 switches interoperate with **twelve third-party models from eight vendors—Alcatel, Allied Telesyn, Avaya, Cisco, Dell, Extreme Networks, Foundry Networks, and Nortel—**covering all mandatory Layer 2 and Layer 3 functions.

Layer 2 results. Both switches passed auto-negotiation, IEEE 802.3ad link aggregation, 802.1p/Q VLAN tagging, Gigabit-Ethernet uplinks, and accelerated spanning tree with every device in the test bed, confirming seamless mixed-vendor trunking and failover.

Layer 3 and multicast. Passport-class routing features exchanged RIP v1/v2, OSPF, and BGP-4 tables with every peer that supported each protocol, and VRRP hot-standby operated with eight of nine capable switches. In multicast drills the NEC pair worked with all switches via DVMRP, seven via PIM-SM, and six via PIM-DM, showing robust group distribution in diverse environments.

Optional capabilities. The switches forwarded 9,000-byte jumbo frames at zero loss with every participant; only Alcatel’s unit skipped this test due to configuration issues.

Bottom line: BlueFire 720 and 740 give network managers confidence that new NEC equipment will integrate smoothly into heterogeneous Fast-Ethernet and Gigabit backbones while supporting advanced routing, redundancy, multicast, and jumbo-frame features without interoperability gaps.

Note: The BlueFire LAN Switching product line seems to have been phased out before 2010.