Are megarouters coming to your net?

Internet router start-ups see applicability of their products in campus networks.

By Jeff Caruso AND Jim Duffy
Network World, 05/17/99

It may not be long before enterprises will require the power of gigabit and terabit routers now targeted for the Internet.

In the next 12 to 18 months, enterprises will have enough traffic on their networks to mandate the speed, port density and quality-of-service capabilities of the Internet super routers, claim officials from several router start-ups. In addition, officials say technologies for increasing fiber capacity, such as dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM), will be inexpensive enough to deploy in the enterprise.

"The big campuses are starting to deploy the DWDM gear at enterprise levels," says Mukesh Chatter, CEO and president of Nexabit Networks in Marlborough, Mass. "As they deploy DWDM, it becomes critical that they feed it with something that has high-density OC-48 [2.4G bit/sec] or OC-192 [10G bit/sec] connections."

"As we start delivering inexpensive wavelengths to enterprises, each wavelength could be OC-48 or OC-192," says Ash Dahod, president of NetCore Systems of Wilmington, Mass.

Enterprises typically don't exceed 1G bit/sec in the LAN or T-3 in the WAN. But growing corporate use of the Web and the Internet, coupled with a desire to converge voice and video onto data networks, is driving the need for more bandwidth, more ports and higher-performance devices that can discriminate between a CEO's companywide videoconference and a solitary employee's use of PointCast.

Such bandwidth requirements may now be isolated to only the biggest enterprises. Nexabit's current marketing efforts are focused squarely on service providers, though Chatter says two of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies have approached Nexabit inquiring about the company's NX64000 terabit switch/router.

While this amount of enterprise customer interest doesn't exactly represent a ground swell, Chatter is confident that interest will grow as bandwidth usage increases - and that's where DWDM comes in.

This technology uses multiple wavelengths, or colors of light, that are fired down a single fiber to multiply fiber capacity. DWDM switches use lasers to divide incoming traffic - voice, video and data - into separate optical wavelengths, or light streams.

DWDM is usually targeted for the core of service providers' optical networks. But start-ups such as Sycamore Networks and Monterey Networks are developing gear that makes it cost-effective for enterprises to increase the capacity of their fiber cabling via DWDM.

Indeed, internetwork vendors such as Cabletron and Nortel Networks have recently announced plans to add DWDM capabilities to their campus switches in recognition of the moves toward converged network traffic and increased bandwidth use.

"It doesn't take too much before 5,000 users, each requiring 10M bit/sec full duplex, turns into a 50G bit/sec full-duplex backbone," Chatter says. "That's 25 OC-48s, and that requires DWDM."

To DWDM equipment, OC-48 is a single channel in a 40-channel pipe, and 40 OC-48s add up to 100G bit/sec of bandwidth. Multiple DWDM pipes require a routing switch that can handle hundreds of gigabits. If a campus network supports 10,000 or 20,000 employees, bandwidth requirements stretch into the terabit range.

"High bandwidth is going to become a commodity," NetCore's Dahod says.

Initially, enterprises will gain access to optical wavelengths for point-to-point connections with some ability to reroute around failures, Dahod says. But Layer 2 and Layer 3 intelligence now provided by equipment in service providers' networks - equipment from the likes of Nexabit and NetCore - will have to be added to enterprise nets as these dumb, cheap wavelengths enter and exit them.

"It simplifies the job for the carriers by getting them back into the Layer 1 business and letting the corporations add Layer 2 and Layer 3," Dahod says.

The best way to enable corporations to provision their high-speed Layer 2 and Layer 3 services may be through Gigabit Ethernet, says Pete Chadwick, vice president of marketing for terabit router start-up Avici Systems in Billerica, Mass. "There could be a requirement for boxes in the 50G to 100G bit/sec range with Gigabit Ethernet interfaces on them," he says.

Still, Chadwick says the likelihood of an enterprise actually installing a network made up of many terabit routers is "a harder stretch . . . Certainly, we're not doing anything to specifically target the enterprise."

The question of whether terabit routers will be used in the enterprise may become less important as companies outsource more of their network operations to service providers, says Joe Furgerson, vice president of marketing at Juniper Networks, another maker of big, fast routers.

"Enterprises are redefining the public/private network interface," he says.