Alcatel-Lucent today announced new products and strategy aimed at extending resiliency throughout the IP network and all the services on it. The news includes the introduction of a six-slot version of the 7450 Ethernet Service Switch; the Service Router Operating System release 5.0 for both the ESS and the IP Service Router; a new release of the company’s 5620 Service Aware Manager (SAM); and new Ethernet and Multi-service Media Dependent Adapter (MDA) interface modules.
In announcing the news, Steve Shalita, senior director of product marketing for the company’s IP division, talked about how customers are demanding more from the network and their services in terms of both bandwidth and expectations for always-on connections. That’s why Alcatel-Lucent is raising the bar by delivering high-availability capabilities not just at the switch/router, but end-to-end on the network, he explained.
Shalita said Alcatel-Lucent is positioned particularly well to do this given its leadership position in high availability for routing and customer/business services, noting the company’s high-availability capabilities related to router hardware, link-layer protocols, non-stop routing protocols, non-stop VPN services, MPLS, graceful restart and in-service upgrades found in the 7450 ESS and 7750 SR platforms.
Alcatel-Lucent holds the No. 2 position in the global IP/MPLS edge market, according to Ovum-RHK, which said it had more than 19 percent market share in the fourth quarter of 2006. More than 160 service providers worldwide, including AT&T Inc., BT and Telstra, use Alcatel-Lucent’s gear. “So this is the foundation, we’ve done this for a while, and BT Exact has validated that,” Shalita said.
Yet increasing customer requirements, service providers’ need for differentiation and long restoration times due to link failures mean this resiliency now has to be extended end to end and go beyond just platform resiliency, he said, and the new OS release for the ESS and SR has a variety of new features aimed to do just that.
It includes support for multichassis link aggregation (MC-LAG) and subscriber routed redundancy protocol (SRRP), which enables dual-homed links from any IEEE 802.3ad standards-based access device – like an IP DSLAM, Ethernet switch or VoD server – to multiple Layer 2 or Layer 3 aggregation nodes. In contrast with slow recovery mechanisms such as Spanning Tree, MC-LAG provides synchronized and stateful redundancy for VPN services or triple play subscribers in the event of the access link or aggregation node failing, with zero impact to end users and their services.
“MC-LAG allows us to extend links to multiple devices in same CO or diff COs,” said Shalita. “What we’re doing is the end device thinks those [communications] are from the same box. Multichassis synchronization is used, so if link fails all traffic seamlessly moves to link two. This is unique and a first in the industry.”
Shalita said SRRP, meanwhile, is a takeoff on VRRP, an IETF protocol that provides router synchronization. But he said VRRP doesn’t scale to the subscriber environment, where there are many subscribers with a variety of different services, so SRRP allows Alcatel-Lucent and its customers to scale to address subscribers in a triple-play environment.
Also new with release 5.0 of the OS is pseudowire and VPLS link redundancy, which extends link-level resiliency for the applications to protect critical network paths against physical link or node failures. This enables the virtualization of redundant paths across the metro or core IP network to provide seamless and transparent fail-over for point-to-point and multipoint connections and services. When deployed in conjunction with multichassis LAG, the path for return traffic is maintained through the pseudowire or VPLS switchover, enabling carriers to deliver “always on” services across their IP/MPLS networks. “It’s really seamless, subsecond failure,” and creates an alternate path over which new traffic coming over the network can travel, Shalita added.
Release 5.0 of SAM, meanwhile, doubles the management platform’s capacity and allows for multivendor, end-to-end service troubleshooting through third-party device configuration management and alarm surveillance. Shalita said the platform now supports up to 500,000 ports in a single platform, has increased statistical collection capabilities, and is more automated in terms of tunnel creation and testing based on time of day or other parameters.
As for the new 7450 ESS, this new six-slot solution has a 80gbps switch fabric and fills a gap between the existing one-slot, seven-slot and 12-slot variants by offering locations requiring high availability, but lower aggregate bandwidth and interface capacity, a more targeted solution.
Finally, the new media dependent adapters for the 7450 ESS, 7710 SR and 7750 SR products include a combination gigE/10gigE MDA, and the any service, any port (ASAP) MDA that works with the 7750 SR platform by supporting multiple services on a single interface.
The latter is a four-port OC3/STM-1 product that can terminate frame relay, PPP and ATM access circuits down to DS0 level on each channelized OC3/STM-1 interface. This allows fixed carriers to consolidate a broad mix of business services at the IP/MPLS edge as well as enabling mobile carriers to transport ATM-based 3G voice, data and signaling traffic across an IP/MPLS backbone as part of transforming their network infrastructure and services to IP.
“It enables flexible technology and service mixes in network,” said Shalita. “It’s like a service router in a single card.”
All these products are already available with the exception of the new 5620 SAM release, which come out next month.
Alcatel-Lucent www.alcatel-lucent.com
