Extreme Networks Inc. has introduced the BlackDiamond 20808, a metro Ethernet transport switch it says offers much high capacity and a lower cost than competing solutions.
“We’ve jumped to the lead in port density,” said Peter Lunk, director of service provider marketing for Extreme Networks, who called the 20808 the company’s new flagship product.
The switch, which has four times the capacity of Extreme’s BlackDiamond 10808, offers 120gbps per slot bandwidth in an 8-slot system, 64 10gigE ports per chassis and 192 10 gigE ports per rack. Extreme plans over time to upgrade the 2tbps fabric to 5tpbs, and add 40 and 100gigE interfaces.
At 10gigE per port pricing at $5,800, Lunk added, the Extreme solution is much lower cost than those offered by Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco and Juniper. The list price for an entry level BlackDiamond 20808 system, generally available starting in December, is less than $100,000.
Lunk also mentioned the industry battle over whether to move MPLS from core networks into edge networks (as the core router vendors have been suggesting), or adopt provider backbone bridging technology (as the switch suppliers have been pushing), to bring determinism to Carrier Ethernet networks. He said the latter method is clearly the most cost effective and one Extreme is embracing with its 20808, which supports PBB-TE and PBB. In addition to the lower cost of gear, service providers can also save because they don’t have to retrain technicians on the PBB-TE/PBB gear, which looks from a network management standpoint much like SONET.
Other features of the BlackDiamond 20808 include the ability to support of to 250,000 quality of service application queues, fine-grain multicast control, the ability to handle more than 100,000 multicast streams, support for one million MAC address and thousands of PBT tunnels.
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