Router vendors address service quality, security, IP video

Three router vendors have unveiled new and enhanced products to improve service quality, security and video capability.

Alcatel this week shipped new operating system software for its 7750 Service Router (SR) and the 5620 Service Aware Manager. Release 3.0 of SR_OS features improved service continuity, richness and assurance for IP-based business applications, Alcatel says.

The software optimizes the 7750 for converged network delivery of IP VPN, frame relay and TDM services. The software is designed to enable service interworking between all access types and customer locations; to provide hierarchical quality-of-service capabilities and scale to meet peak traffic demands and long-term growth; and to provide high-availability technology for non-stop service delivery and automated end-to-end service assurance testing.

The software is available now and included in the purchase price of a 7750 or 5620 platform.

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Three router vendors have unveiled new and enhanced products to improve service quality, security and video capability.

Alcatel this week shipped new operating system software for its 7750 Service Router (SR) and the 5620 Service Aware Manager. Release 3.0 of SR_OS features improved service continuity, richness and assurance for IP-based business applications, Alcatel says.

The software optimizes the 7750 for converged network delivery of IP VPN, frame relay and TDM services. The software is designed to enable service interworking between all access types and customer locations; to provide hierarchical quality-of-service capabilities and scale to meet peak traffic demands and long-term growth; and to provide high-availability technology for non-stop service delivery and automated end-to-end service assurance testing.

The software is available now and included in the purchase price of a 7750 or 5620 platform.

Juniper this week rolled out a VPN appliance for service providers designed to enable them to turn up managed, network-based SSL VPN services.

The Secure Access (SA) 6000 SP provides end-to-end "virtualization" capabilities that enable service providers to offer remote and extranet access, disaster recovery and intranet LAN security services to enterprise companies. Virtualization is enabled through the product's Instant Virtual System (IVS) software, which allows service providers to create 255 SSL VPN gateways, each representing a customer, on a single SA 6000 SP appliance, Juniper says.

The software also enables service providers to set detailed network, security, and management policies tailored for individual customers. While the service providers own the management of the SSL VPN equipment, they can delegate portal administration, customer-specific log and usage monitoring, end-user access privileges and endpoint policy configurations to each customer, Juniper says. Service providers can cluster multiple SA 6000 SP appliances to offer redundant and scalable network-based managed SSL VPN services to multiple customers.

The SA 6000 SP appliance is available now. Pricing starts at $24,985.

Cisco has added features to two router lines to better enable video transmission over IP networks.

For the CRS-1 core router, Cisco has added an eight-port Gigabit Ethernet shared port adapter designed to increase the router's "QoS-enabled" Gigabit Ethernet port density for aggregation. The CRS-1 now offers up to 768 ports per rack and up to 55,296 ports per system to connect the super headend, video headend and video serving office in national and metro networks.

Cisco has also enhanced its 7600 series metro Ethernet routers with new software designed for distributed video and aggregation applications in national and metro networks. These include:

* Dynamic Multicast, to minimize providers’ bandwidth needs for a larger number of live TV channels.
* Video/IPTV-optimized Asymmetric Networking, which enables providers to deploy only the network bandwidth needed in each direction to support video services.
* Source-specific Multicast, which is designed to prevent distributed denial-of-service attacks.
* Broadcast Source Redundancy, which enables load sharing among live TV broadcast sources with dynamic failover.
* Broadband Policy Manager, which integrates with OSS/BSS systems and provides universal subscriber access and automates policy control operations with business rules to deliver services.
* Video Admission Control, which is designed to maintain a high-quality end-user experience in oversubscribed networks by dynamically determining when network-wide resources can support a video session.