We use the Cyclades-Y series.  The picture on the left in
http://www.cyclades.com/y-series.html

One host card can support 8, 16, 24, or 32 serial ports.  One PC
can support up to four of the host cards, so up to 128 serial ports
per PC.

I believe these are smaller and about half the price of the
Cyclades-Z series.  The Cyclades-Y might not do as well with
lots of serial traffic, but with low-throughput 9600-baud consoles
there haven't been any problems with that.

If the patch that Bill Sommerfeld and I wrote ever gets committed, then
they work quite well.  I can send it to you (or anyone) if they need it.

cy0 at pci1 dev 1 function 0: interrupting at irq 9
cy0: 32 ports

-- Chuck               


Previously, Jason R Thorpe wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 10, 2000 at 07:10:50PM +0200, Feico Dillema wrote:
>
>  > We need to setup a terminal server for a server farm, and try to find
>  > out whether we can use an `ordinary' Intel PC running NetBSD for that.
>  > It would need 32 serial ports, so I'm looking for 8 or 16 port PCI
>  > multi-port serial cards that are supported by NetBSD (or FreeBSD?) and
>  > are easily available. If these are not to be found, then any hints and
>  > tips to alternatives?
>
> I like the Cyclades Z series .. the Ze is a PCI card with a MIPS CPU
> on it, and you can plug up to 64 serial ports (16 per expander box)
> into it with SCSI cables.  It's a little pricey, but it works really
> well.  You can order it with 1 card + 2 boxes for 32 ports.
>
> cz0 at pci0 dev 9 function 0: Cyclades-Z multiport serial
> cz0: Cyclades-Ze, 16 channels (ttyCZ0000..ttyCZ0015), firmware 3.3.1
> cz0: polling mode, 20 ms interval (2 ticks)
>
> We're using them in production at Zembu on NetBSD.  Bill Studenmund and
> I wrote the driver, so we could help out with any problems you might
> have.
>
> There's the Cyclades Y series, too, but they aren't as nice as the Z,
> and I'm not sure of the port density on them.
>
> --
>         -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@zembu.com>