Service Provider Networks / (none) /

Atrica releases 100-Gig Ethernet metro core switch

By Terri Gimpelson
The Edge, 05/15/01

Optical Ethernet start-up Atrica this week rolled out a high-end switch for the core of metropolitan networks designed to overcome the limitations of current Ethernet and optical offerings for that space.

Atrica's A-8800 is a 1.2T bit/sec Ethernet switch that provides what the company claims is the industry's first 100G bit/sec Ethernet trunking capability. The switch mixes Ethernet and SONET traffic on the same fiber and is thus targeted at metro service providers looking to gracefully migrate from SONET to optical Ethernet.

Ethernet MANs are currently limited by low trunk speeds -- 1G bit/sec -- little if any TDM support, traffic processing at each node and enterprise-level functionality and reliability, Atrica says. Adding TDM and wavelength division multiplexing optics to that network requires an overlay approach with many more network elements and higher equipment and operational costs, Atrica says.

These are the limitations the A-8800 is designed to overcome.

For higher-speed access and trunking, the A-8800 supports 1G, 10G and 40G bit/sec interfaces in addition to the 100G bit/sec trunks. Atrica achieves 100G bit/sec trunking by multiplexing 10 lasers at 10G bit/sec each. Atrica estimates chip vendors to start delivering 100G bit/sec chips in 2002.

The company anticipates using three 40G bit/sec lasers to achieve the same capacity by the end of the year when the product will ship. Atrica is currently working with several vendors on 40G bit/sec chips, but would not disclose which ones.

The A-8800 can also support over 1 million Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) flows, Atrica claims. MPLS enables the switch to administer and enforce service-level agreements, the company says.

The switch also supports dense wavelength division multiplexing and optical add/drop muxing. It can support 33 protected lambdas per ring, and can add/drop any lambda at any node in a ring, Atrica claims.

For SONET support, the A-8800 allocates separate wavelengths to Ethernet and SONET and muxes those wavelengths together over the same fiber. A filter then diverts the different traffic types. Atrica says this eliminates the need for extra fibers and overlay networks.

The A-8800 also supports a feature called express optical connections. This capability bypasses Ethernet processing at each node by combining all traffic with the same destination onto the same wavelength. The traffic is moved along to the other nodes until it reaches its destination node, where it is then taken off the wavelength by a 10G bit/sec trunk board and sent to its end-station destination.

Analyst Michael Kennedy of Network Strategy Partners says the box works well to implement an end-to-end Ethernet wide area network (WAN).

"Ethernet, in its origins, was only a MAN solution," he says. "Now Atrica has extended that capability end-to-end. The first obvious benefit to this is cost. Ethernet is much less expensive that existing alternatives like SONET. From a performance point of view, this eliminates various interfaces and transitions, thereby increasing the network's simplicity, reducing its complexity and increasing its reliability."

Kennedy adds, however, that Atrica's focus on Ethernet could be a potential downfall.

"If you want to do a pure Ethernet play, you foreclose on many other sectors of the business like frame relay or voice," he says. "The A-8800 makes it easy for SONET to get on an Ethernet backbone. There's a big pro in offering an end-to-end Ethernet WAN service: the price point. The con is that, in effect, you cut yourself off from legacy equipment. That's a big gamble to take."

Atrica's A-8800 will compete with SONET, DWDM and Ethernet equipment from longtime industry players like Cisco, Nortel, Lucent and Ciena. Also, start-up Astral Point announced a new SONET-based system, the ON 7000, which is essentially the inverse of the A-8800: it supports Ethernet over SONET, while Atrica proposes SONET over Ethernet (http://www.nwfusion.com/edge/news/2001/0514astralpt.html).

Atrica will be demonstrating the A-8800 at SuperComm in June. Trials begin in the third quarter with France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Bezeq and two additional trial in the US. The company expects to ship the A-8800 in the fourth quarter.