What made it particularly tough for the other vendors to catch up to Ascend in our ratings was the Max 6000's high throughput. NBase-Xyplex's EdgeBlaster was slowest in download and upload performance. Some of the units had trouble maintaining download speed as we added clients. We suspect that one reason for such performance degradation is the increased processing load placed on each server as it compresses outgoing data. However, fast, steady performance doesn't mean much if a server doesn't have a competitive feature set.
Some features are givens.
On the downside, the Max 6000 has only four LEDs on the chassis front, giving you scant status information. Ascend also lacks modular flexibility because it has only one power supply. 3Com's Total Control system provides the highest level of versatility with its built-in Windows NT Server 4.0 and a variety of available modem and network cards. Each additional modem and network device card is installed and mapped into the NT server via the chassis backplane in a manner similar to installing a PC peripheral. None of the cards are hot-swappable.