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Stirring a router revival

By Bob Brown

Who's afraid of Cisco Systems, Inc.?

Not Torrent Networking Technologies Corp., which expects to sell its high-powered IP9000 Gigabit Routers into the enterprise and carrier backbones where Cisco routers rule.

"This is the re-emergence of router technology, which people had sort of given up for dead," says Hemant Kanakia, Torrent's founder, president and chief technology officer. "This is as fundamental a technology shift as there was between bridges and switches."

Kanakia says Torrent's offerings, which are scheduled to begin shipping in early 1998, are designed to address three problems with existing routers: slow performance, high pricing and an inability to deliver guaranteed quality of service (QoS) to different applications.

The IP9000 devices are able to zip packets across a network faster than traditional routers, thanks in large part to a patent-pending algorithm that allows wire-speed route searches to be performed, Kanakia says. The devices, which come in eight- and 16-slot versions with 10G bit/sec and 20G bit/sec switching fabrics, can forward traffic at up to 20 million packet/sec with latencies of less than 25 microsec.

"The need for speed continues to rise, so there are opportunities for start-ups in this market even though Cisco owns about half of the internetworking market," says Greg Cline, director of networking and Internet research at consulting firm Business Research Group, in Newton, Mass.

Not only are the Torrent devices speedy, but Kanakia says they are more cost-effective than traditional routers - an eight-slot model with 64 Fast Ethernet ports costs about $55,000. One reason Torrent is able to offer more bang for the buck is the IP9000's network interface modules are powered by customized Application Specific Integrated Circuits rather than big, powerful microprocessors, he says.

As for guaranteeing QoS, Tor-rent's devices boast a technology called per-flow queuing. This matches incoming packets to data flows without using proprietary tags and labels. The routers mimic ATM devices in a way in which they can assign certain amounts of bandwidth to applications and prioritize different traffic types.

Even though Torrent is going right after the big internetwork vendors, the company is making sure that its routers work with customers' installed routers. The IP9000s support standard routing protocols such as Routing Infor-mation Protocol 2 and Open Shortest Path First.To date, Torrent has been "an engineering driven start-up," Kanakia says. That reflects on Kanakia, who spent the six years prior to joining Torrent at Bell Labs, where he worked on advanced switch architectures.

But Kanakia left Bell Labs in May 1996 and started Torrent a few months later with $5 million in venture and private funding.

The odds of going up against Cisco might not be great, and analysts such as Virginia Brooks of Aberdeen Group, Inc., in Boston, say they wouldn't be surprised to see an established internetwork vendor gobble up Torrent. But Kanakia says the corporate and Internet backbone markets should open up and give Torrent a chance to succeed on its own.

"You've got Fast Ethernet on the NICs and workgroup switch side to eradicate the workgroup speed bottleneck. The next big speed barrier is the backbone, and that's what we're attacking," he says.