New high-end routers emerge

Alcatel and Chiaro Networks last week became the latest entrants - or re-entrants, in Alcatel's case - in the core router market, a space with high barriers to entry in terms of development cost, long sales cycles, two entrenched and dominant players, and reduced customer spending.

Alcatel announced the 7770 Optical Broadband Exchange (OBX), a respin of its 7770 Routing Core Platform that was an ambitious attempt at terabit scale first announced in late 2000 and shipped in mid-2001. Carriers, however, requested Alcatel start over with a smaller footprint that would fit in their equipment racks.

Alcatel has now scaled down the 7770 into a half-rack system. The OBX features 100G bit/sec of line capacity and a 320G bit/sec switching fabric per half-rack shelf.

Alcatel says the half-rack design makes the router more versatile, letting it support smaller core and edge applications in addition to large core requirements.

Alcatel's OBX retains the 7770's distributed switching and forwarding architecture, and cards from the Routing Core Platform are forward-compatible with the OBX, company officials say. The system includes its Alcatel Carrier Environment Internet System (ACEIS) fault-tolerant routing technique for 99.999% reliability in one system.

Alcatel says ACEIS eliminates the need to deploy a duplicate router for redundancy.

Nine racks of OBX line cards, switching and control shelves result in 1.9 terabit/ sec of line capacity and greater than 5 terabit/sec of switching, Alcatel says.

Analysts say Alcatel's re-entry into the core router market could prove fruitful.

"They have a legitimate chance at making a dent" in the market, says Mark Bieberich, an analyst with The Yankee Group. "They've done a couple of things with this product that differentiate it from the core routers that are in the market today. They've engineered it for a longer lifespan. Instead of your typical five- to seven-year cycle, it doubles that. Second, their reliability technology is very sophisticated and arguably the best reliability technology in the marketplace today. Alcatel has the staying power to lock-in that No. 3 spot [behind Cisco and Juniper Networks, and now occupied by Avici Systems] in 18 months or so."

Meanwhile, Chiaro offered a preliminary glimpse into its Enstara router, an optical crossbar switch that leverages optics to switch packets internally between line cards. Chiaro says it has 50 patents issued on Enstara's design, including a so-called Optical Phased Array (OPA) technique that uses scores of gallium arsenide optical waveguides in parallel to refract light, under electrical stimulation, from a single ingress fiber to multiple egress fibers.

OPA uses interference patterns to bend light to desired destinations, Chiaro says, and can achieve switching speeds of 30 nanosec. A 64x64 Enstara switch with 128 connectors is about the size of a briefcase, company officials say.

Enstara is capable of supporting "hundreds" of 10G bit/sec interfaces in its initial release, Chiaro officials say. It is shipping and is deployed now at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology next-generation grid network, OptIPuter.