A carrier-class act: Aptis' CVX 1800 packs in powerful performance and density

Service providers have no choice but to buy flexible, reliable and dense equipment. Aptis Communications, a start-up networking vendor based in Burlington, Mass., is peddling a new access switch specially built to allay these hefty concerns. Its CVX 1800 rivals products from big networking vendors like Ascend and Cisco.

Marketed to telcos and high-end Internet service providers, the CVX surpasses current access switch offerings in several ways. First, the box can be configured with 1344 digital modem or ISDN ports, or up to 488 T-1 lines, the highest density yet available in one chassis. In a 7 ft. telco rack, the CVX can support 5376 dial-up ports. Ascend's TNT, the former heavyweight in port count, supports 288 dial-up ports per chassis. The CVX also features two channelized DS-3s and a high-speed serial interface port for frame relay and high-level data link control.

"The density is what impresses us," said Jim Barr, senior networking engineer at GTE internetworking in Cambridge, Mass. "We're considering these kinds of products in order to grow as fast as we need to and keep up with user demand." GTE, which is currently evaluating the CVX, builds and operates about one-third of America Online's dial-up network.

The CVX goes beyond current access switch capabilities in other ways. The box is NEBS 3-compliant. That means the unit is especially fault-tolerant, so it can be installed at a carrier's central office or point of presence. For example, the modules that populate the CVX chassis, including the main system controller, access cards and trunk interface, are hot-swappable and can become redundant with the installation of a second card. Comparatively, the main controller system in Ascend's box is built into the chassis.

"These fault tolerance features can blow other access servers out of the water," said Barr, a current TNT user.

Other users of Ascend's TNT agree, comparing TNT's ventilation system with the CVX. The TNT's cooling fans suck fresh air into one side of the box and blow hot air out the other. If the boxes sit side by side, they end up heating each other instead of cooling off. The CVX, however, takes in air at the front of the box and blows it through the back of the chassis.

"The major differentiation is reliability," said Paul Gustafson, president and CEO of Aptis.

As well as being a reliable and dense box, the CVX is also a high performer. Aptis said its non-blocking, distributed processing architecture allows the box to maintain high throughput regardless of how many users are connected. The vendor attributes its high performance to its proprietary application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), which decrease the number of times data is moved within the unit. The ASIC broadcasts incoming data into four different memory banks that store and send the data over a 1 Gb/s packet bus to their destination port. Aptis says the CVX copies and moves data only once, which saves processing power and time.

The CVX also allows service providers to wholesale various WAN services to their customers. The box supports L2TP for provisioning virtual private networks. And ISPs and carriers can serve more than one customer per box by dedicating modem ports to certain locations and provisioning individual quality-of-service levels via user IDs.

Aptis plans to add an OC-12 trunk, digital subscriber line modem support and an interface for a telephony gateway to the CVX. Prices start at $59,000.

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