Extreme unveils upscale carrier Ethernet gear

Extreme Networks announced a new carrier Ethernet platform today, promising dramatic increases in the scale of Layer 2 networks and quality-of-service capabilities designed to serve a variety of applications, from residential to business users.

The new Black Diamond 12K can support as many as 80,000 subscribers, a number Extreme’s senior product manager Peter Lunk called, “a huge difference in scale.” Each 10-rack-unit, 160 Gb/s chassis can contain two blades: one has 20 Gigabit Ethernet ports, the other has two 10 Gb/s ports.

The system also employs a quality-of-service hierarchy with which it can maintain different quality-of-service levels for as many as eight services per subscriber.

The 12K also uses MAC-in-MAC technology to handle as many as 16 million virtual local area networks (VLANs). In addition to the VLAN tags assigned to each frame as it leaves the customer edge, each frame is fitted with a 120-byte “service provider MAC address” header upon entering the core network. And it is stripped of this frame as it leaves the core. For fast transport, devices in the core only read the core header, which is based on the IEEE’s 802.1ah standard for Provider Backbone Bridges.

“As you scale these enormous Layer 2 networks, the devices in middle only need to learn 100 or 1000 [addresses],” Lunk said.

For Extreme, the new product represents a push toward the service provider market, from which the vendor gets only 25% of its revenue today.

The 12K is available starting this month, with prices in the U.S. starting at $60,000 per system.