Responding to the growing carrier interest in Provider Backbone Bridging – Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE), Extreme Networks Inc. on Monday announced the availability of PBB-TE hardware and software for its BlackDiamond switches as well as an interoperability relationship with control plane supplier Soapstone Networks.
BT and Nortel popularized the concept of Provider Backbone Transport (PBT), the technology on which the PBB-TE standard is based, in 2006 and early 2007. The idea behind PBT and PBB-TE is to better position Ethernet to function in transport networks by making it more deterministic. And while powerful suppliers including Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco Systems Inc. and Juniper Networks with strong interests in MPLS gear have downplayed the appeal of PBT/PBB-TE, which they say offer nothing more than what MPLS already delivers, all of the world’s top 10 service providers have either launched or announced plans to turn up PBB-TE trials since BT and Nortel first introduced the concept, according to CIMI Corp.’s Tom Nolle.
Connection-oriented "Ethernet (COE) transport tunnel technologies like T-MPLS and PBT are seeing strong adoption given their early stage of development, and will be an essential ingredient of the service and optical transport layers, as they allow the displacement of SONET/SDH and enable carrier Ethernet switches to displace some routers," concurs Michael Howard, principal analyst at Infonetics Research, in a recent study on Ethernet. "As a result, router and carrier Ethernet switch sales should continue strong as Ethernet and IP/MPLS traffic continues to grow, and at even faster rates than seen in a similar study we conducted last year."
As a result of the interest around COE, a variety of equipment vendors, including ADTRAN Inc., ADVA Optical Networks, Ciena/World Wide Packets, Extreme Networks and Hammerhead Systems, have announced their intentions to support PBB-TE within their product lines.
Extreme Networks is among the first to deliver on that commitment, says Peter Lunk, director of service provider marketing at Extreme Networks, adding that the company’s PBB-TE pitch addresses the fact that service providers already have MPLS cores with which this new technology needs to work, includes solutions that work for various sizes of deployments, and offers automation to lessen the likelihood of outages caused by human error.
The latest version of Extreme Networks’ operating system, the ExtremeXOS 12.1, for the BlackDiamond 12802R, 12804R and 10808 models, now supports PBB-TE. This new capability is included in the cost of Extreme Networks’ switches, says Lunk. Extreme Networks also offers a software license, at the list price of $9,995, which enables service providers to interconnect PBB-TE tunnels to VPLS core networks.
On the hardware side, Extreme Networks how offers two new modules for the BlackDiamond 12900 series switches. For the core, a new management module called the MSM-6R provides enhanced scalability for the VPLS network interconnections. For the edge, Extreme Networks’ new XM-2HR interface module reduces costs by combining a 10GE port and 10 GE ports onto a single board, which Lunk says makes it appropriate for both smaller service providers and less dense applications.
Additionally, Extreme Networks has formed a strategy relationship with Soapstone Networks to provide external control plane software. Lunk says one of the tenets of PBB-TE is that the control plane be outside of the router/switch to allow for more determinism. Soapstone has completed integration of the new ExtremeXOS 12.1 release supporting PBB-TE in their Provider Network Controller (PNC) software package. This package helps automate the entire service lifecycle by providing state of the art provisioning, monitoring, optimization, and planning software for PBB-TE networks.
