Vendors ready new optical network gear

SOUTHBOROUGH, MASS. - Three companies plan to deliver the latest entries into an exploding market for optical network gear in access, metropolitan and core networks.

VIPswitch last week unveiled a high-density optical metropolitan-area network (MAN) switch for provisioning Ethernet-based voice and video services. Luxcore, formerly known as Synchordia, is developing products to bring connectionless- oriented network and Layer 3 intelligence to the optical core.

And Aura Networks, which used to be known as corporate equipment vendor LANcast, is focusing on the service provider market with optical Ethernet access gear.

All three are vying for a piece of the optical equipment market, which is primed to reach about $17.5 billion in revenue by 2003, from less than $5 billion this year, according to Aberdeen Group.

VIPswitch's new V-MAN 160G switch is designed to appeal to tier 2 and 3 ISPs providing retail Internet services, managed services for small to midsize companies, voice over IP with traditional telephone company switch features, and unified messaging. It is also targeted at service providers offering Web hosting, network-based applications and storage-area network services in metropolitan areas.

The switch is a 16-slot chassis with a 160G bit/sec full-duplex, nonblocking, time-division multiplexer fabric supporting virtual output queuing. Its distributed processors run a Linux operating system.

The switch sports up to 320 Fast Ethernet ports on Category 5 cable, or SX or LX optical fiber, and up to 160 Gigabit Ethernet ports on SX or LX. It also supports up to 64 OC-48 ports and 16 OC-192 links.

For Layer 2 services, the V-MAN 160G lets users configure virtual LANs, and it supports Multi-protocol Label Switching tunneling for provisioning of VPNs. For quality of service, it recognizes, classifies and prioritizes flows based on whether the traffic is voice, video or data. The switch supports what VIPswitch calls synchronous parallel flow switching, which the company claims provides jitter-free, wire-speed classification for "toll quality" voice and video.

VIPswitch will join Extreme Networks as an entrant in the optical Ethernet MAN market. But VIPswitch will offer a switch designed specifically for multiservice Ethernet MANs needing toll-quality provisioning of voice and video - not a LAN switch packaged as such, says Yves Hupe, VIPswitch vice president of marketing.

The switch is scheduled to be available in the second quarter of 2001. Pricing starts at $25,000.

Luxcore's offering won't be available until the first quarter of 2002. But the company is looking to increase core bandwidth 1,000-fold by eliminating optical-to-electrical-to-optical (O-E-O) conversions in the optical network.

The best way to do that, according to Luxcore, is to deploy photonic routers into the core of the optical network. The company is using 10 patents pending in optical hardware and packet transport software, and licensing photonic technologies at the system, module, subsystem, component and algorithmic levels.

Today's optical networks are point-to-point systems that rely on electronics to direct optical signals across fiber networks, according to Luxcore. Electronic cores are orders of magnitude slower than photonic cores, and therefore hamper speed and bandwidth capacity. Luxcore's first product, a photonic router with wavelength routing and add/ drop capabilities, will be able to replace optical switches, terabit IP core routers and optical add/drop multiplexers.

Like Luxcore, Aura Networks also changed its name and market focus to get in on the optics action. But the gleam in Aura's eye is on the opposite end of the optical spectrum than Luxcore: Ethernet access.

Aura, which until now honed in on LANs, is developing an optical Ethernet access platform for service providers that it hopes will be the most inexpensive product for provisioning Ethernet metropolitan-area services when it ships early next year. While Luxcore is looking to eliminate O-E-O by positioning it as something bad, Aura is taking credit for inventing electrical-to-optical conversions. The company is also looking to leverage its experience in element management to come up with compelling service management capabilities.

The access product will include a technology that Aura calls Stealth IP. Stealth IP is designed to create a managed and secure link between the firm and service provider while providing real-time management of access devices by implementing administrative bytes into idle time on an Ethernet link. This creates a "quasi-in-band" management channel that enables alarm notification and bandwidth-on-demand, Aura says, alleviating the need to run SNMP at remote sites.