Alcatel-Lucent claims to leapfrog edge router leaders

Alcatel-Lucent says the new edge routing products it introduced today give it a jump on market leaders Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, offering terabit-per-second capacity in a single chassis. But it’s not clear how Alcatel’s latest offering will stack up against new edge gear expected from Cisco later this year.

Third-place Alcatel announced new cards for its edge router and Ethernet switch that it claims gives its gear industry-leading density. When those cards start shipping in the third quarter, Alcatel said, its 7750 edge router will have more than twice as many GigE ports per rack as Juniper’s M320 and more than four times as many as Cisco’s XR12000. And its 7450 Ethernet switch, Alcatel says, will also more than quadruple the GigE ports per rack of Cisco’s 7609 while beating Juniper’s MX960 by a third. The new cards give Alcatel’s gear 10 slots of 100-Gb/s (or 1 Tb/s total) in a third of a rack (in “full-duplex” numbers—not counting both ingoing and outgoing capacities—that’s 50 Gb/s).

“I asked them if they injected steroids in their routers, since it's a significant enhancement on performance and scaling,” said Ray Mota, Synergy Research analyst. “I'm very positive on this announcement.”

The greater density--ten times the performance of Alcatel’s existing edge gear--is thanks to new chips developed in-house by Alcatel-Lucent, the 100-Gb/s FP2, each of which contains 112 processors. The use of in-house silicon echoes a similar move from Cisco, which introduced a new high-density edge aggregator based on its own chips earlier this month (the ASR 1000), and from Juniper, whose own internally-developed chips power the M120 edge router unveiled in 2006.

Alcatel also added integrated service adapters (ISAs) for IP security and deep-packet inspection, aiming to replace external third-party DPI boxes with small, half-slot cards within Alcatel’s own chassis. “Think of our ISAs as entire DPI platforms on a small card,” saidBasil Alwan, president of Alcatel’s IP division, adding that these ISAs can be used to assure the performance of over-the-top applications.

“Without these announcements, there was a strong possibility Alcatel-Lucent's position would have been compromised, but these announcements get their platforms to a more competitive position while also expanding their opportunity,” said Mark Seery, Ovum-RHK analyst, adding that full implications of the announcement would take a while to assess.

The compact ASR 1000 Cisco unveiled this month is not a direct competitor to Alcatel’s flagship edge switches and routers, but rather is closer in purpose to those ISAs, Alcatel said.

“There’s two things going on in the market,” Alwan said. “There’s what I call ‘staple service routing,’ that’s kind of ‘edge routing on steroids,’ that does a lot of high-touch packet-moving for the basic fabric of the network--classification, queuing, high availability, all the key things you need, and density matters. Then there are these high-touch platforms that delve into the application layer. Those are pretty much what we’re doing with our ISAs. The ASR is a bit of a tweener but more on the ISA side.”

Alwan said he expects Cisco to introduce a more comprehensive update to its edge routing platform soon, making use of the processor it debuted in the ASR 1000. And Ovum’s Mark Seery concurred.

“There is a general expectation in the marketplace that Cisco will respond by the end of the year,” Seery said.

Meanwhile, Alwan expects another rival, Redback Networks (now part of Ericsson), to focus more on mobile applications that don’t presently require as much raw capacity as fixed-line video-bearing networks.

With the top edge router vendors introducing new systems based on internally developed chips years in the making, Alwan pointed out that the amount of investment required to stay competitive in the edge router space has increased enormously, making it ever harder for smaller players to compete.