Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) Tuesday announced availability of the 7210 Service Access Switch, a family of small Carrier Ethernet edge devices, and the release of its Carrier Ethernet Framework.
Lindsay Newell, vice president of marketing for IP activities for Alcatel-Lucent, told xchange the 7210 SAS is a customer-located device that will help service providers to offer managed WAN services to enterprises. Importantly, he said, it has OAM capabilities consistent with the gear maker’s other products, enabling service providers to deliver end-to-end SLAs.
Similarly, the new Carrier Ethernet Framework will enable service providers to roll out new managed services.
“The shift from TDM to packet is well under way,” Newell said. The question for carriers is how to add value and differentiate.”
While there are many applications for the 7210 SAS in residential and mobile markets, the focus of the launch is on the business services opportunity, Newell said, quoting stats from IDC that managed WAN services using Carrier Ethernet is forecast at $12 billion by 2012, or 20 percent year-over-year growth.
Newell said the 7210 combines several qualities service providers have been asking for. One of these is a common OS. The 7210 SAS leverages the Alcatel-Lucent Service Router Operating System (SR OS), which is deployed in more than 30,000 switches and routers by 260 service providers.
A second is service management. The 7210 adds support for Y.1731, a standard, which enables end-to-end performance management of Ethernet connections.
Another service provider request is flexible deployment options. The 7210 SAS-E, which is available today, is for basic Ethernet connections. The 7210 SAS-M, available in third quarter 2009, is for MPLS-based deployments and dual-homed networks, which are needed when customers require QoS and traffic management. Newell did not disclose pricing, but said the SAS-M is double the cost of the SAS-E.
While the 7210 is designed as CLE, it also could sit at the CO and act as an aggregation point for 10-20 smaller customers, Newell said.
The 7210 has been in customer trials throughout the world since the beginning of 2009. No participants were disclosed.
The 7210 is part of a larger group of Carrier Ethernet gear. And it also plays in the same space at Alcatel-Lucent’s 1850 TSS, which is an optical and Ethernet switch.
Along with introducing its new Carrier Ethernet edge family, Alcatel-Lucent presented its Carrier Ethernet Framework, a three-tiered structure that includes a transport layer, services layer and application-enablement layer.
Newell said the first phase of Carrier Ethernet was adapting LAN technologies to the metro. The second was developing connection-oriented, carrier-class Ethernet. The next phase is application-enablement. “The Carrier Ethernet Framework helps service providers understand ways they can do that,” Newell said.
