Infrastructure Solutions: Harvesting the Next-Gen SONET Opportunity

Reeves Launches Mangrove

Mangrove’s Jonathan Reeves

Jonathan Reeves’ latest startup, Mangrove Systems Inc., will have its official coming out party and initial product launch this month at SUPERCOMM, unveiling a “third-generation SONET” solution that integrates access, aggregation, transport and packet switching capabilities.

The solution, which includes customer premises and central office devices, is aimed at “service providers with fiber in the ground that want to offer Ethernet over SONET-type services or a variety of services over PWE3 to feed their emerging MPLS cores,” says Reeves. PWE3 is shorthand for pseudo wire emulation end-to-end, the new name of the Martini draft; it’s a standard way to carry frame relay, ATM, Ethernet and other Layer 2 services over MPLS, Reeves explains.

“Basically the packet switching world and the transport world are converging,” says Reeves.

Core networks are evolving from frame relay and ATM technology to MPLS, so there’s Layer 2 and 3 convergence in the core, notes Reeves, adding that new multiservice edge equipment in that vein also is starting to get traction.

Meanwhile, metropolitan networks are undergoing a similar convergence, but that is a convergence of Layers 1 and 2, Reeves says. That means SONET/SDN needs to become “packet-aware” to handle Ethernet, frame relay and pseudo wire emulation, he says. New standards like generic framing procedure (GFP), which allows upperlayer protocols to be transported across SONET/SDH networks in a standardized manner, are helping that along, he adds. “So SONET is getting sort of a new mid-life kicker,” says Reeves.

As a result of this convergence, there’s a need for a new [breed] of access system at the customer premises that can take in frame relay, ATM, Ethernet and SAN interfaces and feed them into these new Layer 2/3 cores, Reeves says. So Mangrove has designed its line of Piranha products to sit at the customer premises or the central office to feed converged MPLS and GMPLS core networks. Barracuda, meanwhile, is Mangrove’s larger CO platform that grooms and aggregates traffic from Piranha devices. Both products will be formally announced and demonstrated live at SUPERCOMM this month.

“There were earlier versions of this type of technology that really didn’t measure up,” says Reeves. “We feel at this time it’s a pretty clear field.” Reeves says, some vendors addressed the convergence with new “dumb Ethernet cards” that plug into multiservice provisioning platforms (MSPPs).

But he says that didn’t cut it because the functionality of these new multiplexers needs to be extended to the customer premises and needs to be smart enough to do quality of service and SLA enforcement.

The first generation of SONET, Reeves says, was based on such devices as add/drop multiplexers and cross-connects. The second generation, Reeves says, focused on MSPPs and new core cross-connects and optical switches.

Reeves says now is the time for this thirdgeneration SONET technology, which makes SONET “much more packet-intelligent, and merges transport and packet switching.”

Scott Clavenna, president of PointEast Research, a San Francisco-based research and consulting firm, says Mangrove is unique in its integration of multiservice switching and MPLS into next-generation SONET. “The idea is that carriers going forward are trying to flatten the network as much as possible... so if you do packet handling in your transport boxes, you reduce the ports you need in the transport network” and that makes the network lower cost, he says.

Clavenna expects Mangrove’s solution to appeal to IXCs initially. That’s because Mangrove’s customer-located equipment can put all of a customer’s traffic over one uplink.

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