The packet-over-optics vendor space continues to expand, with the industry birthing new companies and products faster than a rabbit makes bunnies.
These new companies and their product lines tend to focus on bringing more control to operators of optical networks, whether they're doing SONET, WDM or a combination of the two.
Atoga Systems Inc. (www.atoga.com) this month at the COMNET (www.comnetexpo.com) trade show will unveil an optical application router product. According to P.G. Menon, Atoga's vice president of marketing, service providers today want to get closer to the customer by offering services as opposed to just bandwidth. But service provisioning is cumbersome because each slice of the network comes in separate layers--IP, SONET and WDM boxes. Plus it's tough to define SLAs on a per customer or per application basis, he says, noting that most SLAs today simply have to do with the delivery of bandwidth.
"So we're providing a solution that allows you to guarantee or specify applications on a per user and per application basis," he says. Unlike vendors such as Nortel Networks Corp. (www.nortelnetworks.com) with its Optera product, which does automated circuit provisioning but leaves out the application level, Atoga integrates the three layers of the network so a carrier can do it all with one box, says Menon. The company employs lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) for rules-based application provisioning, so the service provider can just choose from existing templates to offer SLAs.
Meanwhile, Village Networks Inc. (www.villagenetworks.com), which has operated "in stealth mode" for the past two years, recently launched its Optical Packet Node product for the metro network. Kai Eng, founder, president and CEO of Village Networks and a 20-year veteran of Bell Labs, says that the company's Optical Packet Node product combines optical and IP technologies in a single device.
The product supports an efficient any-bandwidth packing algorithm and new benefits in operations, administration, maintenance and provisioning (OAM&P). The device also supports "unbreakable services," meaning that when a fiber is cut, the service provider can restore a user's service without overbuilding a network. It does so by rerouting the specific flow onto another path. The key here is the fact that the Optical Packet Node allows the service provider to see traffic as individual flows. The company calls its ability to identify and isolate each flow--which it says will allow carriers to offer differentiated services and not just commoditized transport--its Optical Flow Networking technology.
| Company | Product |
| Appian Communications Inc. | Optical Service Activation Platform and management tools |
| Atoga Systems Inc. | Optical application router |
| Aura Networks Inc. | Gigabit Ethernet CO & CPE equipment with SONET interfaces |
| Coree Networks Inc. | Core optical networking products |
| Coriolis Networks Inc. | OptiFlow Network products for more efficient bandwidth provisioning and prioritization over SONET or WDM |
| Crescent Networks | Provisioning and management tools for IP services |
| Latus Lightworks Inc. | Optical backbone systems |
| Luminous Networks Inc. | Optical access switch |
| Metera Networks Inc. | Access/metro-area optical system |
| Ocular Networks Inc. | Optical access TDM/data switches |
| PhotonEx Corp. | Core bandwidth-provisioning tools |
| Village Networks Inc. | Optical Packet Node |
The any-bandwidth feature simply means that carriers can more efficiently transport traffic with this system vs. a traditional SONET optical system because SONET allows only preset bandwidth payloads into which IP packet payloads don't usually snugly fit, so there's a lot of bandwidth waste. The Optical Packet Node also offers new efficiencies in that it eliminates multiple layers of protocols--such as SONET, ATM and frame relay--thus eliminating wasted bandwidth on overhead. It also eliminates the hassle of managing all those different levels of equipment and network logic. Other benefits on the network management front offered by Optical Packet Node, according to Eng, include the product's single management system and that system's ability to support one-click provisioning. Specifically, that means a service provider can provision connections instantly because it has complete visibility into all traffic and services.
Another IP/optical vendor--Luminous Networks Inc. (www.luminousnetworks.com)--this fall made its PacketWave optical access switch generally available.
The product employs "resilient packet ring" technology, says Jay Shuler, vice president of marketing for Luminous. Resilient packet ring--a technology on which IEEE study group 802.7 is working--essentially adds the values of SONET to gigabit Ethernet, Shuler explains. Those values include 50 millisecond survivable rings, toll-quality service, and other SONET-like OAM&P.
Despite those SONET-like features, Luminous specifically avoided using SONET and ATM in its box because it adds unnecessary cost and complexity, says Shuler. In addition to SONET's heavy "overhead tax" problem, putting data into SONET--which was created for voice traffic--is like putting a square peg into a round hole. So PacketWave puts gigabit Ethernet directly over WDM connections "so we're using all of the pipe all of the time in both directions on the ring," says Shuler.
Shuler reiterates the industry mantra about combining multiple functions into single devices. "We're collapsing the network because we're eliminating layers," he says. Telcos have hundreds of people managing SONET and hundreds managing ATM. If you're a greenfield carrier adopting Luminous technology, says Shuler, "you can hire one group of people managing the IP layer and you're done."
Aura Networks Inc. (www.auranetinc.com), formerly known as Lancast, is also jumping on the optical Ethernet bandwagon. Alan Brind, senior vice president of marketing for Aura, says the company is building on its strength in fiber optics, Ethernet and IP.
"We created the electrical-optical conversion marketplace," he says. Now the company wants a piece of the wide area metropolitan Ethernet equipment market.
Aura calls its architecture Stealth IP. Its CPE is an Ethernet service unit with little complexity, which doesn't include an SNMP [simple network management protocol] stack. At the CO is the Intelligent Fiber Service Unit, which is a fiber provisioning unit that concentrates traffic and manages CPE. A 12-byte protocol is used to send and receive information between the CO and the CPE for monitoring of the customer-located equipment.
Meanwhile, Coriolis Networks Inc. (www.coriolisnet.com), an optical networking startup focusing on revenue generation, ease of migration and service delivery in metropolitan networks, launched its premier product in late October. Coriolis says its products can enable service providers to recover 75 percent of stranded bandwidth generally found in SONET networks and to parse out bandwidth as desired for voice and data applications.
Bob Castle, president and CEO of Coriolis, also notes that SONET add/drop multiplexers and optical networks in place in today's public networks are very inefficient in providing bandwidth, both in the large chunks of bandwidth they provide to all applications--whether or not those applications need the entire amount of that bandwidth--and in the manually intensive way in which provisioning occurs. Coriolis addresses those problems by providing service providers and their customers the ability to access bandwidth on SONET and WDM connections at a more granular level and with far greater ease, he says.
The company's OptiFlow Network line of products is based on an architecture Coriolis calls Optical Spatial Division Multiplexing, which shapes the way information is packaged inside SONET and WDM transport. Voice is still slotted into virtual tributaries as with traditional SONET solutions. But instead of using only traditional SONET hierarchies for data, Coriolis recovers stranded bandwidth by breaking down the SONET or WDM bandwidth into a contiguous block of bits so customers can set up bandwidth "frame relay style" for committed data rates plus bursty data.
The products statistically mux bursty traffic so a service provider can oversubscribe the bursty data. As a result, service providers can offer different classes of service, or they can look at packets themselves and discover the kind of service required, or see who originated it and decide on the fly what priority to give it. The system prioritizes traffic using MPLS and differentiated services (DiffServ) QoS standards.
Coriolis' products also do domainwide bandwidth management, explains Castle, noting that a domain is an entire metropolitan ring. This technology looks at all the data streams from all the nodes on the ring and manages requests for bandwidth instantan eously from any node.
"In our system, instead of just a series of nodes on the network, our approach is to have a logical star, with one node with intelligence that doles out bandwidth on an as-requested basis," says Castle. "So what we're able to do is accumulate the best effort variable traffic from many nodes, and we could oversubscribe an OC-48 by a factor of two, three, four or five."
A third differentiator of the Coriolis products is their ability to transport information in native protocol form, says Castle. "We are not converting different kinds of services to some alternative form for purposes of transport from egress to ingress" as is done in ATM, he says. However, the products do offer interworking between such protocols as Ethernet, frame relay, ATM and TDM. The difference is that Coriolis "decouples" the services that the carrier presents to the customer from the backbone the carrier uses to connect its sites. As a result, the carrier, rather than the end user, manages the transport protocol.
Castle says what's happening in the optical network-using products such as those from Coriolis is analogous to what happened a few years ago with the transition from dedicated to switched carrier services. In the old days, customers used permanent circuits and paid for them whether or not they were using them. The switched model allowed customers to send traffic through the network "cloud" and pay only for the bandwidth used. Likewise, SONET has traditionally been provisioned for a specific amount of bandwidth between two points on the ring, and once a SONET add/drop multiplexer is provisioned to offer a set bandwidth, it tends to stay that way, says Castle, so there's a lot of wasted bandwidth. The new approach is treating the optical network as a "cloud" where all nodes connect to the network and any location can request bandwidth as needed.
Castle offers up a couple of scenarios for service providers that might find that approach attractive. Consider a CLEC who today has heavy TDM business but some data services. That CLEC is concerned because new generation service providers in its area are offering high capacity Ethernet loops. So the CLEC needs a platform to protect its TDM business and yet offer a scalable, flexible approach to packet services with the same cost structure as the next generation carriers. Castle says the Coriolis solution fits that bill.
On the flip side is the next generation provider standpoint. That service provider might be concerned about gigabit Ethernet connectivity becoming a commodity service and be looking to offer higher-margin offerings. The Coriolis product line would enable them to support services such as VoIP with the carrier-class functionality of traditional voice networks that allow for 50 millisecond delivery and SONET-like reliability.
And with the network management software Coriolis offers, a service provider could also provide bandwidth to multiple retail carriers, dividing an OC-48 arbitrarily into chunks for various carrier customers. The network management system would enable each carrier customer to securely manage its own bandwidth.
Of course, the network management software could also be used by corporate end users to provision their own bandwidth and make sure their service provider was delivering bandwidth as promised, notes Castle.
The company expects to make its products generally available this quarter. The products include two trunk unit options, which would do aggregation and act as the central node of a logical star network, and three service unit options, which would sit at the customer premises to serve a single customer or an entire building. The products support up to 16 OC-48 rings (or eight protected rings); or two WDM rings with 16 lambdas; or a mixture of OC and WDM. Cards in the trunk unit and service units can allow a service provider to upgrade individual locations to WDM without having to change cards in any other nodes in network, says Castle. Packet and circuit switching fabrics also exist in each of these nodes, reducing requirements for switching in CO, he says. "Our goal is to provide only big chunks of aggregated traffic to COs," says Castle.
Another startup, Ocular Networks Inc. (www.ocularnetworks.com), is expected to soon announce a line of optical access TDM/data switches based on its Metro Business Access Architecture. The switches are scheduled to be generally available in the first half of this year. Today, several vendors are offering multiservice switches that support TDM, ATM and IP services, says Doug Green, vice president of marketing, but those products require separate cards for each transport protocol. As a result, carriers need to make assumptions for what their demands will be for TDM, ATM and IP, he says.
"We've created the Metro Business Access Architecture which incorporates the use of a single switching fabric from TDM to ATM to IP. TDM meets all standards for SONET found in a regular cross-connect. Data is not subjected to SONET hierarchy fixed T1 increments. And [since it's all on the same switch fabric rather than on separate cards] you don't have to do planning ahead of time and don't have to swap out hardware if your traffic mix changes."
PhotonEx Corp. (www.photonex.com) made its debut in November and this quarter plans to release details about its products, which the company says will enable simpler bandwidth provisioning at the core. CEO Kristin Rauschenbach says the company has a patented optical front end (the company licensed patents from MIT and developed its own technology) that allows the equipment to offer very high speeds at long distances.
"We're not really talking about our approach at the optical layer, it's how we leverage optics, analog electronics and the digital hardware that surrounds it," she says. "We're starting at the 40 gigabit rate. Others can get up to the 40 gigabit rate, but they're gasping for air when they get there. We always intend to be ahead of the game--with 80 gigabits and beyond that going forward. You always want the backbone rates to exceed the feeds going into it." The reach of the system will be from hundreds of kilometers to megameters, she says.
Crescent Networks (www.crescentnets.com) also introduced its architecture last fall. Crescent's Dense Virtual Routed Networking technology enables service providers to quickly and easily create, provision and manage collaborative IP services for the entire extended enterprise (headquarters, branch offices, partners, suppliers, preferred customers) and next-generation service providers (ASPs, content delivery providers, web/application hosting providers), according to the company, by integrating dynamic, highly scalable virtual routing, sophisticated optical-scale application QoS, and collaborative service management. Specific products based on dense virtual routed networking (DVRN) had not been announced at press time.
And a company called Appian Communications Inc. (www.appiancom.com) sells the OSAP 4800 Optical Service Activation Platform and an accompanying service and element management product, which sit at the "optical services edge" to enable carriers to provision services and bandwidth on demand. The management product, AppianVista, is expected to begin shipping this quarter.
Karen Barton, Appian's vice president of marketing, says the company is addressing the "first mile problem" of having to wait months for the installation of such services as T1. She notes that such services require a lot of truck rolls and can result in high customer churn due to the long install and repair times.
Appian wants to simplify service delivery virtually all the way to Ethernet in the wall and provide the carrier the ability to offer a variety of services over Ethernet while leveraging existing carrier infrastructure such as SONET, she says. "Our product can parachute into the existing SONET infrastructure" without requiring a box on either end, she says.
The company last fall had five beta customers, including ISP Everest Broadband Networks (www.everestbroadband.com).
The promise of the optical buildout is quicker provisioning to protect a carrier's existing customer base and to allow the carrier to add new customers and deliver more bandwidth for the new generation of packet services, she says.
Tying into the idea, AppianVista gives providers a service level view of their networks. It also includes a series of advanced service management features such as event correlation. For example, it can collect faults around network and correlate them to operator-established rules for faster fault recovery and for sending out alerts if SLAs are in danger of being violated as a result.
A transaction server feature of AppianVista, meanwhile, can track changes at the service level. For example, if a customer adjusts his or her bandwidth, it tracks that so the service provider can bill for it. And a toolkit with AppianVista hooks the product into the rest of a carrier's operations support systems via various API options.
Other newcomers in the optical space that will surely address the IP-optics connection are three companies being supported by Iris Group, an incubator announced in late September that has the goal of providing end-to-end optical networking solutions by bringing together a group of startup vendors. Charter members of the Iris Group include Metera Networks Inc. (www.metera.com) of Richardson, Texas, which is developing access/metro-area optical systems; Latus Lightworks Inc. (www.latuslightworks.com), also of Richardson, which expects to sell optical backbone systems; and Coree Networks Inc. (www.coreenetworks.com) of Tinton Falls, N.J., which is working on core optical networking products. The group, made up of companies that are legally separate entities with distinct corporate and financial structures, expects to expand in the future with additional startups. Iris Labs Inc. (www.irislabs.com) of Plano, Texas, meanwhile, will define the architecture and network management strategy for the group and provide the Iris startups with operational expertise. Members will pay licensing fees to Iris Labs for the architecture intellectual property. Iris Labs will also sell network management software directly and through its members.
"The first wave [in WDM was] getting the basic WDM systems to work. Then came Monterey with the second wave--to find a way to manage WDM pipes," says Michael Zadikian, chairman and CEO of Iris Labs. "Now we're looking at optical infrastructures and the application of that bandwidth in a more integrated manner so you don't look at network as pipes and then applications, but you look at the network as intelligent data services."
