Alcatel set to launch IP offensive
 
|
|||
 | |||
|
PARIS - Alcatel will make a hard charge at U.S. businesses this week with a variety of high-end IP products aimed at putting the European company on the short lists of convergence-minded corporate IT buyers.
The vendor's new enterprise Ethernet network core and edge switches - set to be unveiled at the Alcatel Forum customer conference - purportedly offer the highest concentration of Layer 2-Layer 4 Gigabit Ethernet ports on the market, while two new VPN offerings could help users more effectively secure remote connections into corporate networks. With this multiproduct push, Alcatel is looking to compete more aggressively with Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and Enterasys Networks.
Competitively, what may help Alcatel is a product line that now includes high-end datacom products as well as traditional and IP voice gear, observers say. Competitors Avaya and Nortel offer data products and split the PBX market in the U.S., but have been slow to get IP voice products out the door (Siemens announced voice-over-IP products this week; see story for details). And while chief rival Cisco owns the switching and voice-over-IP markets, it has no PBX customer base and users and analysts consider it a bit green as a player in the telecom market. Enterasys, Extreme Networks and Foundry Networks do not offer IP voice products. Key channel partnerships that Alcatel has made recently also will help.
Alcatel will introduce the OmniSwitch 8800 for large enterprise backbones, and the OmniSwitch 7700 and 7800 for enterprise wiring closets or midsize enterprise backbones.
The three boxes are being positioned as alternatives to products such as Cisco's Catalyst 6500 and 4000, Extreme's BlackDiamond, Foundry's BigIron and FastIron, and Nortel's Passport 8600 switch.
With support for 384 Gigabit Ethernet ports, the OmniSwitch 8800 tops all competing products in terms of Gigabit density, Alcatel says, while its 8800 and 7000 series products will cost up to 60% less than similarly configured products from competitors.
"Alcatel's switching division has been in the witness protection program for the past two years," says Stan Schatt, vice president at Giga Information Group, pointing out that Alcatel has not had a major switch product release since its OmniCore backbone switch was launched in 2000. The OmniSwitch line, he adds, "will go a long way in getting credibility in large enterprises."
The OmniSwitch 8800 is a 16-slot chassis intended for the core of large companies' networks. It can support a maximum of 384 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 680 10/100M bit/sec ports or a mix. Line cards will include an eight-port minigigabit interface converter card and an eight-port Gigabit copper blade as well as 24-port mini-GBIC and RJ45 10/100/1000 cards. In the third quarter, a single-port 10G Ethernet card will be available.
Standard OmniSwitch features include Layer 2-Layer 4 switching and quality of service (QoS) with 802.1p tagging and type-of-service prioritization. For security, per-port virtual LAN authentication - requiring users to sign on to a VLAN through a Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service server - and access control lists (ACL) are also standard.
Controlling traffic
Three OmniSwitch 8800s will be installed as the core network at Salisbury University in Salisbury, Md., along with an OmniSwitch 7700 and OmniStack stackable switches to replace the school's FORE ATM-based backbone and 3Com hubs. Besides the much-needed upgrade in bandwidth, the QoS and ACL controls also will be useful for controlling traffic, says Jerry Waldron, CIO at Salisbury.
"What we would not like to do is clamp down on one type of file or technology students use," Waldron says, but adds that he plans to use to the OmniSwitch QoS features "to allow students who need to use our databases to have priority over other things."
The OmniSwitch 7700 and 7800 are 10- and 18-slot chassis, respectively, each with 128G bit/sec switching capacity. The 7700 is aimed at large customer wiring closets and will offer more Layer 3 switching capacity and better failover functions than competing wiring closet boxes, such as Cisco's Catalyst 4000 and Extreme's Alpine. The 7800 could also be used in large wiring closets or in a midsize backbone, according to Alcatel.
Interchangeable line cards for both chassis include two-port GBIC and 12-port mini-GBIC or 10/100/1000 copper ports. Twenty four-port 10/100 cards with in-line power are also available for providing power to devices such as IP phones or wireless LAN access points over Category 5 cable.
Jumbo frames also are supported on all switches for letting Ethernet frames larger than the standard 1.5K bytes be sent, which can be useful for large data transfers between high-volume servers. The three chassis also support redundant management modules for handling management blade failover.
The OmniSwitch line is the first switch from Alcatel that fully integrates the Layer 3 switching and VLAN security technology the company obtained via the acquisitions of Packet Engines and Xylan between 1998 and 1999, according to Giga's Schatt.
"They had real problems with those acquisitions at first because none of the firmware worked together between the Packet Engines and Xylan stuff," Schatt says. "But they've managed to get it all under the same operating system now, which is significant."
The OmniSwitch 8800 will cost between $73,000 and $153,000 depending on configuration and is available in the third quarter, while the OmniSwitch 7700 and 7800 will cost between $33,800 and $42,000 and will be available in the second quarter.
Connecting remote offices
Along with its new enterprise switches, Alcatel is expected to announce two VPN gateways aimed at connecting remote offices to an enterprise headquarters. At the RSA Security show next week, the company will debut the OmniAccess 210 and 250 for small branch offices and large site-to-site VPNs, respectively.
The OmniAccess 210 will offer Triple-DES throughput of 10M bit/sec for 500 VPN tunnels, while the 250 will perform 70M bit/sec of Triple-DES traffic for 2,500 tunnels, according to sources. The OmniAccess 250 increases the number of tunnels by 500 over Alcatel's previous 7137 VPN gateway and puts the company's VPN offering ahead of Enterasys' Aurorian gateway, and on par with Cisco's 3000 series VPN concentrator.
To help push its new gear into U.S. corporate IT shops, Alcatel has signed agreements with channel partners Verizon and Nextira for selling data and voice gear, and IBM Global Services as a network integration partner.
These agreements will be almost as important as the new products in getting companies to take a look at Alcatel, observers say.
Convergence is a virtue
One technical advantage for using the OmniSwitch products in an enterprise wiring closet is with voice over IP because the switches' redundant management modules could increase switch availability, says Lawrence Orans, senior analyst with Gartner.
"Before enterprises are ready to deploy IP telephony, they will need to beef up the overall availability of their LANs. Many LAN products already offer increased availability in the core, but not in the wiring closet" switches, Orans says.
Some users agree with this strategy.
"We wanted to make sure that we don't have to turn in these switches when we want to go with voice over IP," says Tony Stancil, Salisbury's data/telecom director, who helped evaluate the OmniSwitches for the school.
|
|||||||||||||||
Even though IP voice is not an immediate project at the university, Stancil says, "we feel pretty comfortable we will have that capacity with the Alcatel switches in the future because they are both a voice and data company."
Alcatel has been a sleeping giant of sorts in the U.S. enterprise market. The $22 billion firm has had trouble establishing itself as either a complete network infrastructure provider - like Cisco, Enterasys, Nortel or Avaya - or a high-speed switch maker such as Extreme or Foundry.
Alcatel says one-fifth of its revenue comes from the enterprise market.
"Alcatel is an engineering company," says Farhad Engineer, MIS manager at Sequenom, a San Diego genetics research company.
Sequenom last year installed four OmniCore 5022 backbone switches for its office network, and Engineer says he would consider upgrading to the OmniSwitch products. "Their products are great," he says.
"If anything, they are lousy at marketing," he says. "That's why you don't hear about Alcatel as much as Cisco or Nortel and Lucent and Extreme. Certainly their products match up."
RELATED LINKS
Contact Senior Writer Phil Hochmuth
Other recent articles by Hochmuth
Breaking Alcatel news
Latest news and financial info.
