Cisco unwraps new ATM switches

SAN JOSE - Cisco this week will roll out a core switch as part of an accelerated ATM program designed to appeal to service providers that are in no hurry to uproot revenue-generating networks for a wholesale changeover to IP.

Cisco will unveil the MGX 8950, a 180G bit/sec top-off to its ATM WAN switch family. Cisco also will announce a new entry-level ATM switch and a route processor module for the line.

Cisco hopes the new and enhanced products will breathe life into its multiservice switching fortunes. Cisco fell from the third leading supplier in this market to fourth last year, according to Dell'Oro Group, with 14.2% of the $4 billion market, compared with 28.8% for Nortel, 27.5% for Lucent and 18.9% for Alcatel.

The MGX 8950 is based on the same midplane design as the previous high-end switch, the 45G bit/sec MGX 8850. It features 12 full-height I/O slots that are 10G bit/sec ATM-capable, via four-port OC-48c modules, highly dense channelized OC-3 and OC-12 interfaces, or a single-port OC-192c ATM card currently in trial.

Other vendors, such as Nortel and Lucent, say there is no market for OC-192c ATM because of challenges in segmenting and reassembling packets and cells at that speed. Cisco developed a new ASIC, called Europa, to handle that task. The company, however, did not say when a single-port OC-192c or quad port OC-48c ATM modules would ship for the 8950.

The 8950 also features four 60G bit/sec switch fabrics that run independently yet "listen to" and balance traffic running through the entire switch for what Cisco says is instantaneous recovery in case of failure. This compares to subsecond to multiple-second failover common in ATM switches currently on the market, the company says.

Less than 10 cells passing across switch fabrics are lost in the event of a failure, Cisco says. And though the actual switching capacity of the 8950 is 240G bit/sec with the four fabric cards, one of those four is presumed to be for hot standby.

For investment protection, full-height broadband modules from the MGX 8850 are upgradable to the new switch; half-height narrowband modules are not. Software also is consistent across the MGX and BPX ATM switch line, Cisco says.

The entry-level switch, the 8830, is a 1.2G bit/sec nonblocking switch that features eight I/O slots, Private Network-to-Network Interface (PNNI) routing and modular optical ATM transceivers.

The modular transceivers are analogous to Gigabit Interface Converters found in Gigabit Ethernet switches, which allow service providers to hot-swap transceivers to mix optical interfaces or perform in-service repairs.

The route processor module, called the RPM-XF, features Cisco's Parallel Express Forwarding (PXF) ASIC, which is technology for forwarding millions of IP packets per second.

PXF is designed to enable deployment of new Cisco IOS services for Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS), quality of service (QoS), security, policing, traffic shaping and filtering. PXF helps the RPM-XF achieve performance of 2.6 million packet/sec and lets service providers "up sell" frame, ATM and voice customers to new IP-based services, such as voice over IP.

Previously, the MGX 8850 had an RPM that achieved 400,000 packet/sec performance. That RPM featured a Fast Ethernet interface but the new RPM-XF sports Gigabit Ethernet and packet-over-SONET interfaces to communicate with other switches and routers. RPM-XF is compatible with IOS-based Cisco routers. The PXF ASIC also is in Cisco's 10000, 7600, 7300 and 7200 series routers.

Cisco is wrapping these new and existing ATM switches under an umbrella called the Advanced ATM Multiservice Portfolio (AAMP). AAMP is intended to offer an extensible, scalable product line with which service providers can "control the pace of their network evolution" from ATM to IP/MPLS, while deploying new services, Cisco says.

Key to AAMP is the Cisco Virtual Switch Architecture (CVSA). CVSA lets the Cisco switches incorporate three control planes using the Multiservice Switching Forum's Virtual Switch Interface: PNNI for ATM, MPLS for IP and Media Gateway Control Protocol for packet voice.

CVSA is designed to let the switches support ATM, IP and voice simultaneously over a single switching plane, letting service providers offer a mix of services from a single platform. CVSA will let service providers migrate their core networks from PNNI to MPLS without requiring new hardware, Cisco says.

Cisco recently announced a similar capability for its routers. Two weeks ago, Cisco enhanced its 7000 series of edge routers with Any Transport over MPLS (AToM). AToM is designed to let public carriers converge multiple disparate data networks onto a single MPLS-based backbone, which Cisco says will save capital and operational costs.

AToM enables the encapsulation of Layer 2 protocols -- such as ATM, frame relay and Ethernet, for example - in MPLS for transport across an MPLS backbone. AToM also offers QoS and traffic-engineering capabilities that let service providers charge for services based on traffic class and maximize network utilization, Cisco says.

The company says AToM complies with the Internet Engineering Task Force's Draft Martini specification for encapsulation and signaling.

Cisco says it works with customers individually to determine whether to steer them to CVSA-enabled ATM switches or AToM-enabled routers for their multiservice backbones.

The MGX 8950 is shipping now. The MGX 8830 and RPM-XF is scheduled to ship this summer. Cisco did not disclose pricing. n

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