Service Provider Networks / Internet Routing / View from the Edge:

Laurel's hearty router

By Jim Duffy
The Edge, 05/18/01

Just when you thought the edge router market was sewn up between Juniper and Cisco, another newcomer has emerged touting a platform "dedicated" for edge duty.

Laurel Networks, a company not quite 2 years old, this week rolled out its ST200 Service Edge Router, a 10-slot, 200G bit/sec device designed to eliminate up to four layers of access and edge aggregation, switching and routing before traffic reaches the core switching and optical transport layers.

The "edge-optimized architecture" of the ST200 includes a midplane design housing forwarding engines in the front and the line cards in the back. Two of these chassis can fit in a single telco rack.

The line cards include eight-port channelized OC-12, two-port channelized OC-48, and four- and 16-port Gigabit Ethernet line cards. Channels range from DS-3 to OC-48, and ATM, frame relay, TDM and packet-over-SONET traffic can run on each channel.

The four-port Gigabit Ethernet card is designed for applications in which traffic from many customers is aggregated over a single port. The 16-port card is designed for one dark fiber customer per port, says Stephen Vogelsang, Laurel co-founder and vice president of marketing.

Vogelsang and his mates that launched Laurel all came from FORE Systems, the Pittsburgh ATM switch leader that was acquired by Marconi.

Laurel may have a tall order ahead of it, given that Cisco and Juniper own 98% of the Internet router market. Laurel also will go up against Unisphere's ERX1400 and Amber Networks' ASR2000.

The ST200 not only outshines these rivals on density and uplink efficiency, Vogelsang says - at least three-and-a-half times the DS-3 and OC-3 density, five times the Gigabit Ethernet and three times the OC-12 capacity - but the box is also designed to do per-customer traffic shaping, policing, accounting and buffer management. Laurel is ahead of the curve here too, Vogelsang believes.

The system is also designed to enable service providers to offer customers premium services for free provided they stay "on-net." It also supports Layer 2 and 3 VPNs, ATM and frame relay over IP/Multi-protocol Label Switching - perhaps similar to Juniper's MPLS Circuit Cross-connect capability - and long-haul Ethernet over IP/MPLS.

The ST200 will be demoed at SuperComm next month, which is when lab trials will start. Laurel expects to ship the product for revenue before year-end, Vogelsang says.