The PIC slots can support optional interfaces such as fiber and copper gigabit uplinks. Our switch shipped with a single 1000B-SX interface. The NSM on the back has the ability to add another four PIC cards for WAN interfaces. As a person with a curious disposition, I had to break out the screwdriver and pop the top. I found an additional expansion slot, which I was pleased to discover was for an optional PCI accelerator card for handling encryption and compression.
Nemesis performs stateful inspection to identify data within the communication layers.
Many switches have claimed to support Layer 3, when actually they only support a subset of Layer 3 functionality. Allied Telesyn assured me that its switch is a fully functional Layer 3 switch. Especially helpful is the way in which Allied Telesyn broke down the management sections into Layer 1, Layer 2 and Layer 3. It made the conceptual thought processes less confusing when configuring the Layer 3 functionality. Unfortunately, configuring the firewall was not as simple as the general switch management.