Alcatel-Lucent revs up edge routers

Alcatel-Lucent this week joined an ongoing announcement party among major router vendors by unveiling significant upgrades to its edge lineup, highlighted by a new chip.

The company said its 7750 Service Router (SR) and 7450 Ethernet Service Switch (ESS) now deliver terabit performance to support the growth of IPTV, WebTV, business VPNs, and 3G and 4G mobile services. Terabit speeds are enabled by Alcatel-Lucent's internally developed FP2 network-processing and traffic-management chipset, which at 100Gbps provides a tenfold increase in performance over the company's FP1 device. (Compare Access Router products.)

FP2 was three years in the making, said Basil Alwan, president of Alcatel-Lucent's IP business. "This is a very important announcement for us," he said, adding that FP2 helps Alcatel-Lucent maintain a one-year to two-year technological lead on Cisco and Juniper Networks in the service edge-routing market. "It enables us to continue to lead in this space."

Alcatel-Lucent is second to Cisco in the carrier-Ethernet switch and router market, according to Dell'Oro Group. The two vendors accounted for 75% of the $4.6 billion worldwide market in 2007, with Cisco responsible for more than half, Dell'Oro notes.

Souped-up silicon has been a recurring theme among major router vendors in the first quarter of this year. Cisco recently announced its QuantumFlow processor for the new ASR 1000 line of edge routers, and Juniper launched its entrée into enterprise LAN switching by touting the high-performance "Hurricane" ASICs of its EX line.

While the EX is an enterprise play, Alwan says Cisco's ASR 1000 is not in the same category as the terabit-enabled 7750 SR and 7450 ESS.

"It's a different class of product," Alwan says. "It's more like our [Integrated Service Adapters] in a box. It's more of a [deep-packet inspection]-ish platform -- 10Gbps with high touch, like an ISA. It does not compete with 7750 or 7450."

ISAs are deep-packet inspection modules for the 7750 that add intelligence and packet processing for specific tasks, such as IPSec VPNs or application assurance. Indeed, this week's FP2 announcement includes those two specific ISAs for the 7750 and 7450.