Lucent Technologies Inc. today formally unveils its TMX 880 MPLS Core Switch, a replacement to the company’s earlier-announced MPS25000 multiservice ATM core switch. Lucent had announced the MPS25000 at SUPERCOMM 2001, but pulled the plug on the initiative last fall before its release, saying developing an entirely new product would allow the vendor to deliver IP/MPLS core switching functionality more quickly than it could by adapting the ATM switch to support IP/MPLS.
“We discovered there was a pull in the service provider market to get to a common converged MPLS core,” explains Sarbpreet Singh, vice president of product management for multiservice switching at Lucent. “TMX brought that faster than we could’ve done with the MSC, which was at its heart an ATM product. We wanted ATM/MPLS integration from the get go. We also needed OC192 from the beginning, and ATM OC192 is not something customers wanted.”
The TMX 880 MPLS Core Switch, to be demoed at CeBIT in Hannover, Germany, is based on the Nexabit product, which Singh says has “unique low latency and low jitter.” The new box is designed to allow service providers to support today’s profitable frame relay and ATM services along with newer IP-based services on a single backbone, says Singh. Frame relay and ATM services represent a $10 billion market in the U.S. today, but IP is expected to be the key driver of traffic going forward, he adds.
One of the key attributes that separates the TMX 880 from the pack is its “fluid signaling” technique, which integrates IP and ATM on the backbone, says Singh. More than simply encapsulating ATM and other Layer 2 traffic over an IP MPLS backbone core, as some router-based vendors have done, Lucent’s solution actually allows carriers to “seamlessly map services across ATM and MPLS domains” to give service providers end to end management of all their services, he says.
ATM virtual circuits, or VCs, need to carry data in both directions. Label switched paths (LSPs), meanwhile, are unidirectional. So there’s ATM at the periphery of the network and MPLS at the deep core. “So we take the ATM VC and map it to two LSPs in both directions,” says Singh. “If one of the LSPs goes down, we would take the other LSP down, and when routing is complete we would hook up a new LSP to the ATM circuit. All of that would be transparent to customer.”
Fluid signaling also lets service providers use proxy OAM&P flows through the MPLS domain. “Since ATM and MPLS standards are different, we intelligently interpret OAM&P in MPLS and translate those into the ATM equivalent,” says Singh. That way, carriers can track OAM&P traffic end-to-end, whether it’s in the ATM or MPLS domain, he explains.
Lucent’s Navis iOperations software manages the TMX 880. That’s the same software used to manage Lucent’s BSTDX frame relay switch, CBX500 ATM switch and GX 550 25gig ATM switch. Singh notes that to protect its customers’ investments both in the boxes themselves and in operations support, Lucent has put all its products in this arena under the same management umbrella and simply pushes existing boxes out to the edge as it introduces new, higher capacity systems.
Singh adds that the TMX can be used in conjunction with Lucent’s Springtide box, both of which are based on MPLS, to provision advanced IP services. “You need the Springtide box if you want to offer [services] like IPsec VPNs,” says Singh. “You also need to be able to guarantee QoS over the MPLS core, and we do that.” He adds that the TMX handles ATM cells and IP packets with equal efficiency, enabling it to deliver constant bit rate (CBR) ATM and various levels of service for IP.
In controlled introduction today and with general availability slated for September, the TMX 880 offers 160gbps of full-duplex capacity. It supports OC3 to OC192 on packet over SONET. It supports 16,000 to 64,000 virtual circuits per TMX 880 port. The switch fabric has 1+1 automatic protection switching. It includes a redundant, hot swappable control processor. It delivers redundant path configuration, full LSP backup and MPLS fast reroute. ATM interfaces for the switch range from OC3 to OC48. GigE interfaces are slated for availability in April.
“The 880 is a kind of ground-breaker product; it's the first big core product to have serious ATM/MPLS features in a single box,” says Tom Nolle founder and president of consulting firm CIMI Corp. “As such, it's the logical choice for service providers that have a current ATM/frame revenue stream and yet are looking at IP services to dominate after 2005 (by which time we'll have residential broadband).
“The big question now is what will happen with MPLS,” adds Nolle. “The 880 makes it
clear that carriers will view MPLS as a kind of ‘insurance policy’ to protect their long-lived investments into the period when IP revenues will dominate. But it will also open an alternative provisioning approach for legacy services like frame and ATM, and the question now is how many vendors will jump on frame/ATM-to-MPLS edge technology, and how soon.”
