Without the plastic bezel.
Several manufacturers made FDDI concentrators, including Cisco, 3Com, and SysKonnect.
The ones I'm personally familiar with were made by Cisco: the WS-C1100 and the WS-C1400. There are minor differences between them, but as far as I know there's no reason to prefer one over the other. You can find them on Ebay for reasonable prices.
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Without the plastic bezel. |
In the lower left corner, it has a WS-C1511, which provides A and B MIC connectors to link the concentrator into a DAS backbone. The lower main card is a WS-C1531, providing eight MIC M ports. The upper main card is a WS-C1533, providing eight CDDI RJ-45 M ports.
You can still find plenty of documentation for this unit at Cisco's website, where it is sometimes also referred to as the WS-X11xx, with the last two digits indicating how the unit was configured at the factory. Besides the C1511 MIC A/B card, there were also A/B CDDI cards and a card with ST connectors which used single-mode fiber. Line cards available include four- and eight-port MIC FDDI, eight-port CDDI, and four-port single-mode FDDI (which looks like it has SC connectors but the picture in their documentation is too small to be sure).
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 All ports in the top card have dust covers in them. The rightmost port in the lower card has a different kind of dust cover in it. |
Unlike the WS-C1100, the WS-C1400 only has the two main cards. This unit has a pair of WS-X1441 cards, each providing eight MIC connectors. The first two ports of the lower card are configured as A and B ports, to link the concentrator into a DAS backbone. All the other ports are M ports. As far as I know, the configuration of the ports is software-controlled.
You can still find plenty of documentation for this unit at Cisco's website, where it is sometimes also referred to as the WS-X14xx, with the last two digits indicating how the unit was configured at the factory. The cards for this one are a bit funkier: eight MIC FDDI ports, 8 ST single-mode FDDI ports, 10 SC FDDI ports, 16 CDDI ports, and a card with two MIC FDDI ports and twelve CDDI ports!
All text and pictures copyright (c) 2003 James Birdsall.