Torrent to unveil high-end gigabit router

Silver Spring, Md.

A year after shipping its initial product, start-up Torrent Networking Technologies this week will unveil its second offering, a high-density gigabit router designed to help service providers deliver new data services to users.

The IP9520, which is being evaluated by Extranet, an ISP in New York, and VAS-Net, an ISP in the U.K., will make it easier for enterprise users to outsource their WANs and take advantage of advanced services, such as virtual private networks and IP fax, voice and video, according to Gordon Saussy, Torrent vice president of marketing.

"Enterprise WANs are going to be outsourced completely to service providers," Saussy says. "And enterprises that are outsourcing WANs are going to see new options emerge. Service providers and carriers are going to be able to deliver high-availability, high-speed advanced Internet services" with a product such as the IP9520, he claims.

The IP9520 is a denser, more resilient cousin to its predecessor, the IP9010. Torrent claims to have shipped more than 50 of the eight-slot, 10G bit/sec IP9010s, which have been available for about a year.

Currently, most service provider points of presence (POP) are populated with Cisco's 7500 series routers for delivery of Internet data services to end users. With performance in the 500,000 to 1 million packet/sec range, these software-based routers are only adequate for basic Internet services, such as e-mail, FTP and Web surfing, Torrent claims.

If users are looking to off-load some business-critical private network functions onto the Internet - such as internal voice communications and trading with external business partners - POPs are going to need a high-speed, high-density, fully redundant router that can forward tens of millions of packets per second and guarantee quality of service, Saussy says.

That's where the IP9520 comes in. The 20G bit/sec router features 15 slots for DS-3, OC-3 and OC-12 WAN interface modules. The IP9520 can support up to 120 DS-3s and OC-3s, up to 60 OC-12 ATM or packet-over-SONET links, and up to 3,136 T-1s and more than 14,000 fractional T-1s.

For redundancy, the IP9520 also sports dual hot-swappable fan trays, switch fabric cards, route processors and power supplies.

By contrast, the high end of Cisco's 7500 line, the 7513, features 13 slots, and optional redundant route/switch processors and power supplies. The IP9520, according to Torrent, supports almost four times as many DS-3s, three times as many T-1s and thousands more fractional T-1s than the 7513. Cisco also recently announced the 7576, which is essentially the 7513 split into two separate routers for redundancy.

If density and redundancy aren't enough to get users to make the switch from Cisco, Torrent has equipped the IP9520 with a Cisco-compat-ible command line interface, which makes IP9520 configuration easy for users who are familiar with the 7500. IP9520 also emulates Cisco NetFlow traffic classification and statistics information, and is fully compatible with the 7500 in large Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) environments, Saussy claims.

These features appeal to at least one user who is evaluating the Torrent box as a replacement for Cisco 7513s serving as core aggregation routers.

"So far I've been pretty impressed with the box and its BGP implementation," says Dan Minick, senior networks architect at Exodus Communications, a Web hosting company in Santa Clara, Calif. Minick also likes the IP9520's command line interface, which he says is "very easy to use, very Cisco-like."

Minick, though, does not like the fact that Torrent is not yet supplying Gigabit Ethernet interfaces on the IP9520. "We need to deploy this right now, and we want Gigabit Ethernet everywhere," he says.

The IP9520 will ship in the first quarter of 1999 at a starting price of $33,595.

Torrent: (301) 918-7187