With "five nines" (99.999 percent) reliability in mind, Alcatel built its ACEIS hardware-software platform from the ground up, said Ben Crosby, senior technologist at the company's Broadband Networks division. While the platform provides hooks for hardware, the software is the news. "Hardware reliability in IP architectures can be done today," said Vinay Rathore, director of strategic marketing. "Software reliability hasn't been delivered in this space."

Through the ACEIS software, IP systems can replicate data on two control cards, each featuring its own database, as it is received. In this way, the system can keep an exact replica of the data coming in so that problems, such as loss of state, do not occur if a failover is required.

To avoid problems with corrupted data, Crosby said, the main control card sends a control message to the backup card right before the primary card fails, saying a corrupted packet has been received. Then, the processor in the backup card can drop the packet and continue to process packets entering the system.

At the same time, the system will use signaling protocols, such as Simple Network Management Protocol, to send messages back to the network about the status of the bad connection. "This is not just simple replication," Crosby said.