Ethernet Grows Up

Bringing Carrier Class to the Next-Gen Service

Ethernet services revenue in the United States has grown at double-digit rates during the last few years, and it’s expected to grow at a healthy 57 percent CAGR from about $400 million in 2003, to about $4 billion in 2008, according to The Yankee Group in a May 2004 study.

That’s slower than the uptake of Ethernet services in the Asia Pacific, where revenue in this space totaled $2.69 billion in 2002, and are projected to reach $15.24 billion by 2008, according to data released in May by Frost & Sullivan. That’s not bad considering that the Asia-Pac carriers tend to have more dark fiber than United States-based service providers and don’t have a deep investment in legacy SONET technology as do the RBOCs.

“The U.S. is very active in Ethernet services, but it initially had a late start compared to the rest of the world,” says Nan Chen, vice president of marketing for optical Ethernet vendor Atrica and president of the Metro Ethernet Forum. “The RBOCs all offer Ethernet services, but most services today are based on point-to-point connectivity. In most cases the RBOCs do native Ethernet — not Ethernet over SONET.”

That’s because Ethernet services range from 10megabits into the gigabits, while most service providers are running 2.5gigabit SONET, he says. “At this juncture, I’ve not seen Ethernet over SONET as a major push for U.S. incumbents,” Chen adds, noting optical Ethernet delivers SONET-like 50msec resiliency without actually requiring SONET infrastructure.

Whatever the transport, The Yankee Group says Ethernet services have wide appeal because of their ability to address a wide range of needs including Layer 2 networking, dedicated Internet and IP VPN access. The attraction of Ethernet services can also be attributed to their ease of use, cost effectiveness (due to economies of scale from the ubiquity of Ethernet technology in LANs), scalability (meaning Ethernet services can be provisioned in increments of 1mbps) and flexibility, according to Yankee.

Bigger and Better

Although Ethernet grew up in LANs, there are many vendors today that sell Ethernet products deemed carrier-class — and new service providerfocused Ethernet products continue to heighten the heap. In presenting some of the newer Ethernet products to the carrier market, many vendors are emphasizing what they say are new levels of scalability and reliability and the ability to offer frame relay-like SLAs.

For example, Alcatel last month unveiled the 7450 Ethernet Service Switch, a product optimized for large-scale Ethernet service delivery with SLAs that provide per-service provisioning, per-service quality-of-service (QoS), per-service accounting and a service-aware operational toolkit.

“It’s not an enterprise Ethernet switch that’s being modified,” says Lindsay Newell, director of product marketing in the IP division at Alcatel, who declined to provide pricing on the new product, which is generally available now.

To date, says Newell, Ethernet services have been sold purely on cost. “But the addition of MPLS and service-aware products like the 7450 enable service providers to increase the value of Ethernet services to enterprises because they can start offering per service QoS and faster failover (50msec),” he says.

“We believe our major differentiators are the service orientation and service scaling,” Newell adds. “We support point-to-point Ethernet services, VPLS, multipoint Ethernet services, the scalability of services each having QoS, OAM tools and accounting.”

Carrier-class Ethernet service was among the themes Tellabs focused on at last month’s SUPERCOMM.

Since service providers want to offer the same QoS guarantees for Ethernet services that they offer for legacy services like frame relay, Tellabs emphasized Ethernet service creation at the show with its existing 8800 MPLS box, as well as the 8600, which is a new product that Tellabs introduced to the North American market at SUPERCOMM. The 8600 IP/MPLS multiservice node, which goes up to 42gigabits, is a smaller size and capacity device compared to the company’s previously announced 8800, which offers up to 320gigabit capacity. Key to the new 8600 is its new single ASIC-based architecture that enables carriers to put MPLS and Ethernet as far to the edge as possible in an affordable manner, says Stuart Benington, director of portfolio marketing at Tellabs. The network management system for the 8600 allows for end-to-end provisioning and network management and can guarantee end-to-end service levels, he adds.

Tellabs’ 8815 multiservice access node, which can sit at the customer premises or on the carrier edge to deliver Ethernet over TDM, was yet another new Ethernet-related product from the vendor at SUPERCOMM. Traffic from the 8815 devices can be aggregated by Tellabs’ 8800 router.

Also at the show, Tellabs introduced a new release of its 5500 digital cross-connect. This new version includes a native gigabit Ethernet interface and supports Ethernet services aggregation and grooming. Additionally, Tellabs unveiled the 8840, a smaller footprint version of its 8860 MPLS-based multiservice edge product.

In other new developments on the Ethernet front last month, Riverstone Networks took the wraps off a new 10gigabit Ethernet edge router the vendor says addresses carriers’ needs for scalability and resiliency at a time when Ethernet services are becoming more mainstream. “It’s the first device designed from the ground up to align with requirements that [service providers] are putting in front of us right now,” says Dave Ginsburg, vice president of marketing and product management at Riverstone.

He adds that unlike many products on the market the Riverstone 15008, which is the first of what will be the 15000 Series, is not a redesigned ATM device or campus-derived Ethernet product. “By optimizing on Ethernet, we can offer a significantly lower price per port — between campus switching and traditional routers,” says Ginsburg, who declined to provide specific pricing for the 15008.

The 15008 includes an IP/MPLS control plane, multiple interface types and the ability to converge traffic over MPLS. The product fits into a third of a rack, and each of its eight slots provide up to 24 gigabits of full duplex capacity. Based on an ASIC-based forwarding architecture, the 15008 supports QoS, tunneling and line-rate (10gbps) IPv4 and IPv6 forwarding.

Addressing reliability, Riverstone says the 15008 is the first Ethernet edge router to employ a distributed and modular operating system architecture, allowing the router to detect and restart errant protocols without affecting the rest of the system. The 15008 has redundant control modules, switch fabrics, and also supports resilient network designs with technologies like MPLS Fast Reroute and service loop detection and prevention.

Riverstone expects to do its first revenue shipments of the 15008 later this year. Among the first users of the 15008 is T-Systems, which is working with Germany’s national research and education network, Deutsches Forschungsnetz (DFN), in trials.

First to the Table

Varun Nagarag, vice president of product management at Extreme Networks Inc., which sells a line of Ethernet switches under the name BlackDiamond, says the company’s high-performance switching gear helped it win some of the early Ethernet WAN business from Ethernet service pioneers like Yipes Networks. “Nonblocking on every port was our early claim to fame,” he says, adding that NTT of Japan is also now among Extreme’s carrier customers.

Other Extreme innovations include VMAN tagging, which allows one VLAN tag to be stacked on top of another, and Ethernet automatic protection switching (EAPS), which delivers SONET-like 50msec failover, says Nagarag.

At SUPERCOMM, eight-year-old Extreme aimed to expand its appeal to service providers by adding to existing platforms and delivering new platforms to deliver larger, more scalable and resilient networks, Nagarag says. “Extreme has been working with service providers to evolve their networks and scale,” he says, adding service providers also need tools to allow their networks to withstand outside attacks.

“Layer 3 MPLS is complex technology, so you don’t want to complicate the service provider network with big routers,” continues Nagarag. “So we’re promoting Layer 2 MPLS, called VPLS. We’ll be announcing VPLS availability in July on the BlackDiamond 6800 and we’ve already won some customers.

We think it goes from VLANs to VMANs to VPLS — that’s the evolution. It’s all about separating user traffic and letting you scale. That technology will also be available in the 10gig BlackDiamond in the future.”

Craig Easley, Extreme’s director of marketing for metro Ethernet, says Layer 3 MPLS VPNs rely on expensive routers from Cisco Systems Inc. and Juniper Networks. That requires a $250,000 to $300,000 investment, he says, while a similar application using the Extreme technology would only require a $50,000 investment.

Also at SUPERCOMM, Extreme announced EAPS version 2, which maintains sub-50msec failover even as rings, the number of subscribers and distances get bigger.

Bob Schiff, director of marketing at Ethernet switch vendor Foundry Networks, which along with Extreme was among the early Ethernet switching vendors, says there’s a general trend toward adding more security to Ethernet switches and delivering products that are higher density and lower cost. With VoIP becoming more mainstream, there’s also demand from carriers for Ethernet switches to provide QoS and low latency, he adds.

This month, Foundry made available software enhancements for the NetIron 40G, the company’s terabit-capacity 10gigabit Ethernet services router. Those enhancements include nonstop packet forwarding with hitless management module failover for Layer 2/3 switching and OS upgrades; Internet-scale, wire-speed Internet edge routing and accelerated route convergence with Foundry Direct Routing; end-to-end SLA enforcement with advanced bandwidth management; and secure and scalable network infrastructure with hardware-based IronShield security and extensive access control lists policies. The software feature enhancements are available without charge for customers under NetIron 40G service contracts.

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