Force10 brings Ethernet’s cost to MPLS core

As promised this spring, Force10 Networks is adding MPLS capabilities to its ExaScale core switch router this month, promising to bring Ethernet economics to the MPLS core.

While the rulers of the core router market, Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, offer Ethernet options in their IP/MPLS core routers, Force10 claims to be uniquely offering purpose-built Ethernet gear in that space. The Ethernet-based ExaScale was designed for MPLS, Force10 said, but as a software download, which it now supports.

"When a traditional core router costs $1 million and the Ethernet interface costs $100,000, that really doesn’t bring in any kind of Ethernet economics," said Kevin Wade, Force10’s senior director of product marketing. "If you stack up a core router and one of our ExaScales, we’re a tenth the price of a 10-GigE interface."

Much of that economic benefit comes from avoiding the expense of supporting legacy technologies like Sonet, so carriers still migrating from Sonet probably wouldn’t consider the ExaScale in their cores. However, Wade said large wholesale backbone providers should be good candidates for the gear. Force10’s products have historically been tailored primarily for data center operators and large enterprises, but their applicability is crossing over into carriers more all the time, Wade said.

"Cloud computing in the data center space is merging with the service provider space," he said.

Force10 introduced the ExaScale in March, proposing it as a good fit for cloud computing applications because its 10-gigabit-per-second Ethernet interfaces – which matched growing data center needs for 10-GigE -- could be paired with MPLS capabilities (not present during the product’s initial launch) to dynamically move data and services from one data center to another.

"If you’ve got an overutilized data center and want to burst a service out to another cloud data center, we shove that stuff down a provisioned tunnel using MPLS," Steve Garrison, Force10’s vice president of marketing, said then. "Logically it’s still one data center."