A few bits about Zuma
They have been working for over 1 year on this product. The box is working in the lab. It is designed as an "Enterprise, Metropolitan type product". Note the word Metropolitan. What's in a word? Look at this NAC link - lots of routers needed:
new-access.com
Their presentation was titled "Engine for the 21st century". Another slide was titled: "Raising reliability to an Art form".
They have their architecture defined and a game plan for implementing it. Rather than try to do too much initially with ASICs and Software, and avoiding major hangups or delays getting the full-blown design working (which was stated is the reason other companies are having silicon problems) the first iteration of Zuma uses just one ASIC and "off the shelf" software. This is very smart, as they get the box out the door sooner and producing revenue, while they continue to work on subsequent iterations of the architecture with more bells and whistles. They expect to have boxes in customer's hands during 2Q 2000.
They got the first spin of their ASIC back in June. It works, with 1 minor problem, that will not delay their rollout.
Zuma will have "at least" a 4 fold performance increase over Extreme's high end product, with the "highest port density in the industry today".
Their design includes:
4 matrix cards, each 64Gbps
16 access cards with four "IOM"s each. Each IOM has options for a 2 port GBE (gigabit Ethernet), or 16 port 10/100 dual IOM, or a CPU module with load sharing capability.
They can also handle 10GbE when it comes out - either 16 if oversubscribed or 8 if not. "Oversubscribed" means you don't expect all ports to be running full bore simultaneously, so the higher port density doesn't overtax the box.
Other terms used in the presentation: "Supercomputing Switch/Router", "tremendous flexibility", "Powerful and sophisticated QoS (quality of service) and traffic management, targeted at "Very large" Enterprise or Internet customers with NSP/New Telcos a long term goal.
Zuma will enable "Revenue generating networks", meaning a customer using Zuma can have multiple customers running on the network, with complete security and reliability for each.
All in all, this box looks HOT! |
