The ERS 8600 is the successor to Nortel's Passport (formerly known as Accelar) 1000-series of routing switches.
Origins Rapid City Communications, founded in April 1996, developed the F1200 routing switch in 1997. The main advantage of this product over others at the time was the ASICs on the modules allows the switching and routing of packets to take place on the ASIC chips within each module, instead of having to forward them to a central processing unit (CPU).
Bay Networks In June 1997, Bay Networks agreed to acquire Rapid City for $155 million in stock (equivalent to $ million in ). Bay Networks changed the name to the Accelar brand name in 1997. The F1200 was renamed Accelar 1200 and was initially released in January 1998.
Nortel Networks When Nortel acquired
Bay Networks in 1998, work had already begun on the next-generation routing switch, the 8000 series. A layer 2 version of the 8000 series, known as the Accelar 8100 Edge Switch, premiered in June 1999. In April 2000, the Accelar brand name was retired and the product renamed the Passport 8100. In May 2000, the Passport 8600 Routing Switch was released. In May 2001, Nortel introduced one of the first 10 gigabit Ethernet switch modules at the N + I convention in Las Vegas. In 2004, Nortel retired the Passport brand name and renamed the Passport 8600 to Ethernet Routing Switch 8600 (or ERS 8600).
Avaya In December 2009, the ERS 8600 was sold to Avaya as part of the Enterprise business unit divestiture. In December 2011 this system completed evaluation and certification by the
U.S. Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) testing center for use in the
United States Department of Defense as an Assured Services Local Area Network (ASLAN). On 5 October 2015 it was announced that Avaya would stop manufacturing and selling the ERS 8600 platform by the end of 2016. ==References==