Leveraging existing network investments while adding new services like VoIP and video, increasing subscriber numbers and collapsing networks for better opex have been key themes in the industry for the past few years. Redback Networks Inc. addresses all of these requirements with the latest upgrades to its SmartEdge Service Gateway platforms, which the company says is its biggest product announcement since it came out with the flagship gateway two years ago.
New 10-gigabit Ethernet and 10- and 20-port gigabit Ethernet I/O cards and a software upgrade announced today increase the gateways’ performance up to four times – enabling the SmartEdge Service Gateway 800 to deliver 240 gigabits, and the 400 model to deliver up to 80 gigabits of “usable capacity” for Ethernet aggregation with advanced IP routing, and subscriber and session management. And that’s all without requiring existing SmartEdge Service Gateway customers to buy a new chassis, says Marco Wanders, Redback’s chief marketing officer. Wanders adds that Redback delivers that 240 gigabits of capacity in a quarter the rack space required by its competitors to provide that kind of performance.
Redback, which declined to provide pricing for the new cards, expects to make the slot-independent, backward-compatible cards, and software, available to customers starting this summer. The company plans to show the enhanced SmartEdge Service Gateways in its booth at SUPERCOMM next month.
More than 100 service providers worldwide today use Redback’s gateways at the edge of their IP networks to ensure their end user customers get the services to which they’ve subscribed at the quality level they expect, says Wanders, adding that BellSouth Corp., KT, MegaPath Networks and various small IOCs are among that carrier group. “We pioneered the idea of subscriber management,” says Steve Schick, Redback’s director of corporate communications. Service providers need subscriber management to scale their broadband services, adds Wanders, noting that more than 32 million of the world’s broadband lines – or about one-third – rely on Redback equipment.
The leap in capacity Redback is offering with its new gateway cards enables service providers to collapse their networks to realize new operational savings and migrate to Ethernet-based aggregation, says Arpit Joshipura, the vendor’s vice president of product management and marketing, naming BellSouth and BT as two examples of carriers already on this migration path.
Wanders notes that, today, most service providers use a BRAS network to serve residential customers and then a separate edge router network for business customers. But service providers are starting to move to just one edge router network to serve both business and residential customers, he says. While ATM is still in the network and will be for some time to come, Wanders adds, all carriers are moving toward aggregation over Ethernet.
The SmartEdge Service Gateways – which now scale up to 64,000 VLANs – can be used in Ethernet-based aggregation, edge routing or BRAS applications or any combination thereof; the product includes both Ethernet and ATM service-side interfaces.
The new programmable ASICs embedded in Redback’s new cards address network convergence because of their performance and flexibility, continues Joshipura. There are two in-service upgradeable ASICs per card. These ASICs can do deep packet inspection for a variety of purposes, including packet forwarding/routing, traffic prioritization, separating “back traffic” (meaning, undesirable traffic) and more.
In addition to the capacity gains and convergence benefits, Redback’s new product enhancements include multicast-level reliability; extended QoS capabilities; and increased availability features on its gateways. Multicast-level reliability extends the current capability of session-level reliability to ensure that all multicast video traffic can seamlessly failover to a redundant card without interruption of any kind. New QoS capabilities include full, hierarchical QoS at wire speed. And the gateways now have better availability due to in-service, interruption-free service updates.
