Alcatel-Lucent broadens Carrier Ethernet lineup

Alcatel-Lucent this week unveiled enhancements to its Carrier Ethernet lineup that include a customer premises switch for business VPNs.  

The company's 7210 Service Access Switch is designed to be owned and managed by the service provider as a component of a managed Ethernet VPN service offering. It is available in two variations: The 7210 SAS-E and the 7210 SAS-M.

The SAS-E sports 12 10/100/1000Mbps Base-T ports and 12 100/1000Mbps SFP ports. It is designed for delivery of basic, traditional Ethernet services, Alcatel-Lucent says.

The SAS-M features 24 100/1000Mbps SFP ports. It includes MPLS-based QoS and traffic management capabilities to support more business-critical transmissions.

Both run Alcatel-Lucent's SR OS operating system and can be managed by the company's 5620 Service Aware Manager or 5650 Control Plane Assurance Manager.

The SAS-E is available now; the SAS-M will be available in the third quarter.

Alcatel-Lucent also rolled out a new software release for its 7450 Ethernet Services Switch and 5620 SAM that extends those products' Carrier Ethernet operations, administration and management capabilities.

Release 7.0 is compliant with the ITU-T's Y.1731 specification for fault management and monitoring, performance management, and delay and jitter avoidance.

Alcatel-Lucent also unveiled a framework for deploying a Carrier Ethernet service infrastructure. The three-tiered framework consists of: the transport layer, which is designed to enable the migration from legacy circuit switching to Carrier Ethernet-based packet transport; the services layer, which helps expand the reach and scale of consumer and business Carrier Ethernet services; and the application enablement layer, which addresses optimization of specific applications over service provider networks and the introduction of additional revenue opportunities, such as advertising.