WAYNE, N.J. — Alcatel has made hardware and software additions to its 7670 routing switch platform that will allow carrier customers to better support the delivery of IP services over multi-service network links.
"We're bringing important IP functions to market that we learned from carriers using the 7670," said Jim Guillet assistant vice president of product marketing in Alcatel's IP Division.
The additions on the hardware front surround the release of an OC-48 board, called the MR-48, that supports the simultaneous forwarding of both IP and ATM traffic.
The 7670 supports a dual control-plane architecture in which IP and ATM control-pane processing is split between two compute architectures on a centralized line card. Forwarding tasks, however, are distributed to the individual line cards. Through the MR-48, designers can concurrently forward IP, multi-protocol label switching (MPLS), and ATM traffic while supporting full ATM and IP capabilities like quality of service (QoS) and access control lists (ACLs).
"This concurrent forwarding capability means that carriers have the tools to reconfigure the line card to meet traffic-level or business level changes," Guillet said.
The MR-48 card provides three I/O options: 1 x OC-48/STM-16, 4 x OC-12c/STM-4, or 16 x OC-3c/STM-1. The board also supports per IP flow rate limiting, reverse path filtering, five-tuple classification of IP streams, and DiffServ code point (DSCP) remarking.
Software Upgrades
To compliment the addition of the MR-48, Alcatel has also made some software additions to its 7670 platform. The biggest addition comes on the non-stop routing front. Through the upgrades to the 7670, Alcatel has brought non-stop routing capabilities to the system's RFC2547bis virtual private networking (VPN) virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) tables. "We have applied ACEIS (the company's non-sop routing software) on a per VRF basis," said Dave Senior, product line manager at Alcatel.
In addition to the non-stop routing expansion, Alcatel has added software to a Gigabit Ethernet card that will allow carriers to terminate Ethernet traffic directly on the card and then transport the traffic out of the box over an IP VPN. Alcatel has also developed software that allows the 7670 to terminate PPP over ATM (PPPoA) traffic as well as software that facilitates Ethernet to frame relay/ATM interworking over MPLS.
So far, the hardware and software additions have proven to be a success for Alcatel. According to the company, Korea Telecom, Indian carrier VSNL, Slovak Telecom, and British Telecom have all tapped into capabilities provided by the upgrade to the 7670. Guillet said the company has also landed wins with two unnamed U.S. ILECs.
The MR-48 card and software upgrades are available now. The software is provided free to carriers with a current maintenance contract with Alcatel. Pricing for the MR-48 was not provided.
