Caspian founder launches edge router start-up

The founder of router vendor Caspian Networks has launched a new company he hopes will apply Caspian’s concepts to a more cost-effective set of products.

Lawrence Roberts, commonly credited as one of the fathers of the Internet for his work on early packet networking initiatives in the 1960s, created Caspian in 2000, which amassed more than $300 million in funding before ceasing operations last fall. Roberts left the company in 2004 to form his new venture, Anagran.

Based in Redwood City, Calif., Anagran borrows Caspian’s focus on “flow-state” routing: identifying streams of related packets rather than individual packets, enabling greater efficiency and speed and allowing carriers to prioritize and discriminate traffic types. But whereas Caspian focused on core networks, Anagran is launching today with a focus on the edge.

“[Caspian was] the first generation of this technology,” Roberts said. “It was expensive.
This one is dramatically less expensive, consumes less power and is more capable. It’s changing the future of routing.”

Anagran’s first product, the FR-100 Intelligent Flow edge router, is one-rack-unit—or 1.75 inches—tall and includes as many as 48 1-Gb/s ports or 4 10-Gb/s ports. It is available now with a list price starting at $70,000.

As traffic enters a typical edge router, Roberts said, it is routed to output queues where it might be delayed or even discarded to remedy delays. Anagran’s router, on the other hand, examines traffic to see which “flow” it belongs to and sends it out at the appropriate rate for that flow—giving priority to time-sensitive video, for example, over peer-to-peer data traffic. If traffic overloads the router, it will deny the lowest priority flows and services. Those at the bottom of the list would experience the equivalent of a busy signal. “That would only happen occasionally,” Roberts said. “It would only happen on Mother’s Day and emergencies.”

In fact, the gear’s ability to intelligently deal with emergencies is described as a key selling point. Roberts is currently in talks with the United States government about possibly using Anagran’s gear in mobile applications to allow for emergency communications.

“There's definitely demand for the concept that Anagran is tapping into, namely greater intelligence in the network to enable better management and provisioning,” said David Vorhaus, Yankee Group analyst. “While there are certainly benefits to [Anagran’s] approach, I don't necessarily see it as a superior alternative [to typical routers].”

As Vorhaus sees it, the routers Anagran would hope to replace are already abundant in existing networks, so carriers that have already paid for them are likely to want to use them for as long as they can. In addition, while Anagran claims its product is much less expensive than traditional routers, deep packet inspection and policy management gear isn’t very expensive right now anyway, he said.

“Operators will be looking for a very high level of reliability if they are talking about using this intelligence to limit certain types of sensitive traffic or assign quality of service hierarchies,” Vorhaus said. “Anagran is operating under the theory that if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it's probably a duck. While that's going to be true in the vast majority of cases, it won't be 100% accurate.”