Vivace delivers with new 320G switch

SAN JOSE - Multiservice switch start-up Vivace Networks emerged from stealth mode last week with shipping products, a Tier 1 customer and what it believes is a cleaner way to meld ATM and IP.

Vivace was founded in 1999 and stocked with talent from Cisco, Cascade/Lucent, 3Com, Sun, Nortel, Intel, Paradyne and AT&T. The company set out to develop products that let carriers deliver multiple voice, data and video services - ATM, frame relay, IP, TDM and Ethernet - over a packet-based network, chiefly IP.

Vivace hasn't been alone in this effort. Other start-ups such as Equipe Communications, Gotham Networks and WaveSmith Networks are tackling the legacy ATM, frame relay and TDM-to-IP conversion, as are incumbents Nortel, Lucent, Alcatel and Cisco.

At stake according to Vivace, is potentially an $8 billion to $10 billion market for these ATM or IP/Multi-protocol Label Switching-based multiservice switches that are intended to let carriers support, maintain and increase revenue from existing services, while making a compulsory migration to an IP core.

Several vendors have announced new and next-generation multiservice offerings, most with staggered or vague shipping schedules. Vivace has made everything available now, including 10G bit/sec Ethernet and OC-192c ATM interfaces.

"Vivace isn't really different from what everyone else is promising. The only difference is, they're delivering it," says Steve Kamman, a CIBC World Markets analyst.

What Vivace is delivering are the Viva5100 core switch and Viva1050 edge switch. The switches are designed to deliver circuit-switched reliability and predictability on packet-based networks by combining deterministic Layer 2 switching and quality of service (QoS) - hallmarks of ATM and frame relay - with the flexibility and intelligence of Layer 3 routing, like that found in IP.

The half-rack Viva5100 is a 16-slot chassis that scales to 320G bit/sec of full-duplex switching. In a full rack, the 5100 supports more than 6,000 DS-3s, and the switch fabrics of separate switch chassis can be interconnected to achieve a 2.5 terabit/sec system, Vivace claims.

Viva1050 is a three-rack unit switch providing 16G bit/sec of port density. The same interface cards - DS-3 through OC-192c, Gigabit Ethernet through 10G bit/sec Ethernet - are shared across the products to help carriers lower costs for spare parts, and the 1050 provides the same throughput of a Juniper Networks M20 router one-third the size, Vivace says.

The product line includes Vivace's patent-pending custom ASICs - the ViSTA Intelligent Packet Engine and the ViSTA Switch Fabric - and the company's VivOS operating system. Vivace says the ASICs and operating system are the foundation of the QoS and "end-to-end service-level guarantees" the switches provide.

The switches provide per virtual circuit and per-flow QoS in which the first 128 bytes of a packet are interrogated to define a flow, and then it is queued accordingly in buffers .5 gigabytes deep per direction per line card. Vivace says this "hard" QoS technique is analogous to ATM's per virtual circuit queuing, but is applicable to all services - not just ATM.

Per virtual circuit queuing is designed to provide a dedicated set of packet buffers to each virtual circuit to ensure that one overused and congested virtual circuit does not affect performance on noncongested circuits.

Also, ports on the Viva line cards are software-configurable to support any service - IP, frame relay, ATM, Ethernet or TDM - on any port, interface or channel, simultaneously. Therefore, trunks can be native IP or ATM, Vivace says.

Gotham Networks claims a comparable software progammability feature in its GN-400 and GN-1600 edge switches. Gotham says its products are shipping.

According to Vivace, the switches also deliver wirespeed ATM-to-frame relay service interworking from DS-3 to OC-192; wirespeed 10G bit/sec IP and frame relay with no packet reordering; 16,000 virtual LANs on one port with no packets dropped; Ethernet over SONET/Synchronous Digital Hierarchy and Ethernet over MPLS support; Draft Martini-compliant Gigabit Ethernet-over-MPLS with per-flow "hard" QoS; and Draft Martini-compliant frame relay-, ATM-, virtual LAN- and PPP-over-MPLS.

The Viva switches have undergone lab and field testing since the third quarter of 2001 by seven Tier 1 carriers. One, whom Vivace declined to identify, has the switch deployed in a production network. At least five of the others have the switches on their short lists of evaluation for deployment, Vivace says.

On the competitive front, Lucent says it is shipping its TMX 880 MPLS core switch in "controlled release." It also is in lab trials with service providers it declines to identify. General release is expected in September.

Cisco just announced its MGX 8950 and MGX 8830 switches for the core and edge, respectively. But Cisco won't say when it will ship single-port OC-192c ATM or quadruple-port OC-48c interface cards for the 8950.

Nortel is expected to ship the Passport 20000 this quarter. Nortel will support OC-192c packet-over-SONET first and then offer a software upgrade to OC-192c ATM when demand materializes, the company says.

Equipe was supposed to ship its E3200 with OC-192c ATM interfaces in the first quarter. The date has been pushed out because carriers looking to evaluate the switch delayed their trials, an Equipe spokesman says.

Vivace will demonstrate the Viva switches at SuperComm 2002 in Atlanta next month. Three 5100s will be interconnected over 10G bit/sec trunks fed by three 1050s, and ATM and IP gear from Cisco, Lucent and Juniper. The demo will show real-time streaming media services over a packet infrastructure.

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