Al-Lu Brings Terabit Capacity, New Functionality to Edge Routers

In just the latest news in what has been come a frenzied multiservice edge router market, Alcatel-Lucent on Thursday unveiled enhancements to its 7750 Service Routers and 7450 Ethernet Service Switches that increase by 10 times their capacity and add new availability, deep packet inspection, IPSec, OAM and quality of service features.

This news comes on the heels of Cisco Systems Inc.’s much-lauded announcement of the ASR-1000 edge router.

However, Basil Alwan, president of IP business for Alcatel-Lucent, said he doesn’t see the ASR as a direct competitor to the 7750. Rather, the ASR, which Alwan described as a lower-end platform that does interesting high-touch services and packet forwarding, but “has highly variable performance”, is more analogous to Alcatel-Lucent’s integrated services adapters, he said.

With at least 200 carrier customers, 50 new customer design wins in 2007 and 20,000 systems shipped, Alwan said Alcatel-Lucent is already the No. 2 player in edge routers and claimed that the additions announced Thursday put the company “way ahead of market in terms of density” and give it a one- to two-year jump on its competitors in terms of base technology.

There have been only a few major shifts in the routing market since its inception, he added. First, there was enterprise routing, with Cisco at the helm; then Internet routing began, and Juniper Networks Inc. got into the market; and now service routing has moved into the spotlight, and “that is where we innovated, and this is where we lead,” Alcatel-Lucent’s Alwan said.

Alcatel-Lucent has been able to enhance its 7750 and 7450 products to be able to deliver terabit capacity via a new, internally-developed chipset called the FP2. The FP2 has been in development at Alcatel-Lucent for three years and, according to the company, “delivers sophisticated and optimized network processing and traffic management at speeds up to 100gbps.” That more than doubles the density of Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports as well as supports up to 10 times the number of services per router, according to Alcatel-Lucent, which expects to make available these enhancements beginning in the third quarter.

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