As part of its re-entry into the core switching and routing space, 3Com Corp. last week added the next family member in its Switch 7700 line with a high-availability version.

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The Switch 7700R is the second member of the chassis-based LAN switch line to come out of the Marlboro, Mass., company's joint venture with Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., of Shenzhen, China. It features a redundant switch fabric that provides 1-second failover in the event the main switch fabric goes down.

"It rounds out the product [line] for high availability and adds onto the existing 7700 enhanced security and performance features at a lower total cost than our competitors," said Charles Gallagher, referring primarily to Cisco Systems Inc. Gallagher is director of product management for modular LANs at 3Com.

After its exit from the market four years ago, when 3Com withdrew its CoreBuilder and NetBuilder core switch lines, it saw an opportunity to re-enter the market as a lower-cost alternative to Cisco, offering a broad range of networking options through its partnership with Huawei Technologies.

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