PARIS - Alcatel claims to have new technology that will allow its core routers to fail without dropping sessions, a feature that the company says will relieve some of the delay problems facing carriers that provide pieces of the Internet backbone.
Called Alcatel Carrier Environment Internet System (ACEIS), this failover software will be available on some of Alcatel's existing hardware and new devices that will be announced by year-end. ACEIS can support 99.999% reliability, which is the reliability that is demanded by traditional telephone carriers, Alcatel says.
The company says ACEIS protects the main routing engine, which handles control-plane routing based on Border Gateway Protocol, Open Shortest Path First and Intermediate System to Intermediate System, the protocols used by Internet routers. This engine holds peering and reachability information about routers in the network. If the engine fails, the router would have to be fixed and restored, leaving other routers in the network unable to connect with the part of the network associated with the downed router.
Without router reliability, service providers will be slow to adopt core IP networks to support high-availability services that can vie against frame relay or ATM, Alcatel says.
"[ACEIS] seems to be an example of Alcatel's ATM switch group putting its experience into routing," says Mark Seery, an analyst with RHK.
The technology also will be able to support more attractive service-level agreements for IP-based services.
Core router maker Pluris demonstrated a seamless failover on its TeraPlex core IP routers last year, but no other vendors have, Seery says. Alcatel says it will demonstrate ACEIS at SuperComm 2002 in Atlanta in June.
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