Ever come across this company before?
(Company name is LuxN...website: luxn.com
Here's some recent press:
New gear gives Gigabit WANs a chance.
Network World, Oct 4, 1999 p39
By Greene, Tim
SUNNYVALE, CALIF. - Line-speed Gigabit Ethernet WANs are out of the question now because they would cost too much for carriers to roll out and customers to buy, but start-up LuxN is working to make such services affordable.
LuxN makes fiber-optic gear that connects customer sites to carrier networks over fiber access links.
The company says its prices are low enough that carriers can offer high-bandwidth connections without breaking enterprise budgets.
The 15-month-old company is just coming out of stealth mode, releasing preliminary information on products that will be announced formally later this year. The offerings include a single-user/single termination device; a multitenant customer site termination device; and a central office aggregation box.
One piece of LuxN equipment would be installed at a customer site and take in traffic from, say, an OC-3 uplink from a Gigabit Ethernet switch anchoring a LAN. The customer site box would pump the traffic out over an optical fiber line to a larger LuxN box in a carrier's network.
From there, the traffic would be dropped on a metropolitan fiber ring for delivery to another corporate site.
The gear would simply transport the customer's traffic without imposing the framing of SONET, much of which is unnecessary for point-to-point links.
LuxN says it will initially offer OC-3, OC-12, Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel cards for its modular boxes. The cards go into beta testing this fall. Other cards will be tested early next year, the company says.
While speeds such as OC-12 may be more generally associated with SONET, SONET gear is more expensive and requires more complex provisioning. While LuxN has not yet priced (or named) its equipment, the company says it expects to charge less than $10,000 for its small customer-site box.
While wave division multiplexing technology that puts multiple wavelengths on a single fiber is becoming more common in carrier long-haul networks, it is generally seen as being too expensive for connecting customer sites into carrier nets. LuxN gear will support multiple wavelengths on a single fiber, but probably not more than eight in order to keep costs down, the company says.
LuxN is tailoring its optical gear for local services by including management software that will help keep down the costs of deploying and upgrading services to many customers.
LuxN's products will also give customers the option of retaining some management control.
For example, LuxN's Color Valve technology allows carriers or their customers to turn the bandwidth on a link up or down as customers' needs change.
The management software's Signal Integrity Monitoring feature tracks the quality of the optical signal over the connection and can be used to monitor service-level guarantees.
LuxN, whose name comes from the Latin words for "empowered by light," draws its key executives from financial and technical firms. Company CEO Tom Alexander was a venture capitalist with Santa Clara Associates, and Vice President of Marketing Lee Zipin was technology adviser to Angel Ventures, another venture capital firm.
Director of Marketing Eugene Park and Vice President of Operations Sabeur Siala both formerly worked at SBC-Technology, which makes laser diodes.
The company has $8 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates and U.S. Venture Partners.
LuxN: www.luxn.com
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LuxN Launches WavSystem Optical Access for Service Providers.
Cambridge Telecom Report, Nov 22, 1999 pNA
LuxN, a new developer of optical access platforms, Tuesday introduced its modular Central Office-to-Customer site product architecture, called the LuxN WavSystem. The first three products released within the WavSystem are the WavPortal, a customer premises interface device that dramatically lowers the entry price for optical access; the WavFarer, a flexible multi-tenant, multi-port optical access multiplexer; and the WavStation, a central office or point-of-presence optical concentrator optimized for hub-and-spoke applications.
The system is tailored for service providers who want to boost enterprise WANs to Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) speeds, or 155Mbps to 2.5Gbps. LuxN's WavSystem enables service providers to reach the 40,000+ multi-site businesses already on or near optical fiber. This powerful and cost-effective system supports GbE VPNs, Fibre Channel, Storage Area Networking and other ultra-high bandwidth applications. It can be deployed for under $10,000 per enterprise terminating unit and from $25,000 per CO-based WavStation. Now in beta test, the WavSystem is slated for general availability during 1Q 2000.
"Businesses and fiber-centric service providers have told us they're ready for this solution," said LuxN CEO and President, Tom Alexander. "We are committed to minimizing all barriers to optical service adoption, which includes: delivering easy-to-install, affordable and remote-manageable systems; helping carriers and end-users locate existing fiber facilities; unburdening carriers from the need and expense to pre-provision SONET subsystems; and dramatically cutting operational networking costs through remote monitoring and management."
"LuxN has a highly skilled design and engineering team and it doesn't surprise me that they've managed to reach below the $10,000 mark for optical CPE," said Andrew Cray, research analyst with Aberdeen Group (a leading IT analyst firm based in Boston, Mass.). "I've seen their beta system in the field. It works, it's highly practical, and it installs easily. Its greatest strength is that it natively supports enterprise applications in a way that would never be cost-justified with SONET."
Market-led product innovation is a hallmark of LuxN. To specify requirements, LuxN's developers and engineers have spent the past year working with copper and fiber-based CLECs, as well as ISPs, Internet Service Exchanges, cable operators, multi-tenant property managers, dark fiber providers and application service providers. In response, WavSystem was developed to correspond closely to the now-familiar DSL service architectures, equipped with CO or POP concentrators to collect and hand off user traffic to high-speed backbones or ISP POPs, as well as, carrier-owned, carrier-managed termination devices to interface with customer premises switches and routers.
To boost WavSystem's performance advantage -- 1000 times above DSL to Gigabit Ethernet speeds and beyond -- and deliver substantial operational improvements, LuxN designed WavSystem to include:
* Single and multi-wavelength WDM link classes, * A broad range of upstream and downstream transport/LAN interfaces for GbE, ATM (OC-3/-12/-48c), Fibre Channel, N x T-1and 10/100 Base-T, * Remote provisioning features, * Redundant architecture, and * End-to-end wavelength management.
Product Detail The Central Office optical concentrator, named the WavStation, supports up to 16 interface modules, is cascadable to a total of 32 channels, and has a total capacity of 80Gbps. WavStation pricing starts at $25,000, which includes the first service module.
Two versions of the customer premises network interface device have been designed: one for single-tenant service termination, called the WavPortal; the other for multi-tenant, multi-port service termination, called the WavFarer. Both devices can either accept optical signals directly from a Gigabit Ethernet switch, or perform the E/O conversion needed to interface with future copper-based Gigabit Ethernet. WavPortal is priced at under $10,000 per device, while WavFarer starts at $15,000.
"To help extend Gigabit Ethernet across metropolitan area networks, Extreme Networks is working closely with LuxN and dark fiber providers to provide the reliable physical layer connectivity that corporate enterprises and service providers have come to expect from high-cost SONET systems," said George Prodan, vice president of worldwide marketing for Extreme Networks. "Working with optical access platform vendors, such as LuxN, provides a valuable service to our customers since it offers another alternative to extend our low-cost, high-performance Layer 3 and 4 switching technology to metropolitan area networks."
The modular WavSystem suite supports a broad range of access architectures, including point-to-point, cascaded multi-drop, access ring and redundant star network configurations.
LuxN has also developed an intelligent service management suite for WavSystem, which includes the following innovative features:
* Integrated Photon Transport, which eliminates a management overlay network for Optical Administration. In effect, IPT lets service providers recoup an entire wavelength for customer payload that would normally be dedicated to carrying management information.
* ColorValve remote optical bandwidth provisioning, which eliminates costly truck rolls and technician time through software-enabling moves, adds and changes via "point-and-click" operations.
* ColorSIM (Signal Integrity Monitoring), a "wrapperless" and non-intrusive signal link integrity monitoring scheme. ColorSIM is a practical, near-term solution to lower the bandwidth required to monitor and deliver Service Level Agreement quality information, and represents a cost-effective alternative to Digital Wrapper or SONET techniques used in metropolitan or core networks.
"One of the key driving forces behind the rapid growth and adoption of storage area networks is their ability to serve as an infrastructure for the backup, mirroring and restoration of enterprise data," said Dave Tang, Gadzoox Networks Vice President of Marketing. "Advanced technologies, such as LuxN's WavSystem, that complement SANs with increased bandwidth and distance capabilities for wide area storage management applications can further enhance the value of enterprise SAN deployments. Gadzoox is committed to working with leading developers such as LuxN to develop, test and integrate these value added capabilities as part of our leadership in advanced SAN solutions."
LuxN is a Silicon Valley-based developer of optical access network platforms. LuxN solutions will enable local service providers to cost-effectively extend their managed optical networks from metropolitan points of presence to enterprise customer premises. The company was founded in 1998, and funded by prominent IT venture partners New Enterprise Associates, US Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures; in addition to corporate partnerships with Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Siemens. FMI: luxn.com.
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LUXN MARKETS NEW PLUMBING FOR THE LOCAL LOOP.
Fiber Optics News, Dec 6, 1999 v19 i47 pNA
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based LuxN, a developer of optical access platforms, has introduced a modular central office to customer site product architecture called the LuxN WavSystem.
The first three products released within the WavSystem are the WavPortal, a customer premises interface device; the WavFarer, a multi-port optical access multiplexer; and the WavStation, a central office optical concentrator optimized for hub and spoke applications.
"We are an optical access company that is attempting to exploit the dark fiber between a central office and a customer premises," says Paul Strudwick, LuxN vice president of marketing. "There are a lot of companies trying to deliver [wavelength division multiplexing] solutions within the access environment. But in may cases in shorthaul applications, it makes sense just to use dark fiber and equipment like our own, which passes along optical signaling."
LuxN does offer WDM connectivity from end-user sites to central offices, but as Strudwick says, "We are not a WDM company." The LuxN WavSystem can pass WDM, gigabit ethernet, 10/100 Base-T ethernet, fibre channel, ATM or T-1/E-1 signaling from an end user-site to a central office.
"We deliver point-to-point single wavelength, or multiple wavelengths, to the end user," Strudwick says. "Some customers may only require one wavelength to carry gigabit ethernet or fibre channel signaling. But we can carry multiple wavelengths back to the point of presence as well. The WavFarer, for example, can carry up to eight 2.5 Gbps channels."
The WavStation is a central office optical concentrator. It takes wavelengths from the WavFarer or WavPortal and passes on the signal to a carrier's backbone. The WavStation is 16 inches high and fits into a standard 7-foot rack. It is a 16-slot shelf, so a carrier can terminate 16 wavelengths on it.
The price for the WavStation starts at $25,000. That includes a universal optical card for one wavelength. The cost of adding additional wavelengths varies from $8,000 to $14,000 per wavelength, depending on the distance from the central office to the end user's site, and depending on whether the customer is using a point-to-point application or a WDM application.
LuxN's WavPortal is similar in size to a large modem. It stands 1.75 inches high and is 8.5 inches wide. The WavPortal will transmit gigabit ethernet, 10/100 Base-T, T-1/E-1, fibre channel, or OC-3, OC-12 and OC-48 signaling back to a WavStation at a central office or point of presence.
The WavPortal's cost starts at $10,000 for a unit with a universal optical card installed. The card will handle all signaling, except for T-1/E-1 signaling. A special card is available that mixes up to eight T-1/E-1 lines with 10/100 Base-T ethernet signaling.
The WavFarer is 8.75 inches high and 17.1 inches wide. It can transmit gigabit ethernet, 10/100 Base-T, T-1/E-1, fibre channel, or OC-3, OC-12 and OC-48 signaling back to a WavStation.
"The WavFarer is intended for sites where one channel is not enough," says Eugene Park, LuxN director of product marketing. "It is for a site where a customer wants gigabit ethernet, but they may also want OC-3 ATM. The WavFarer can send up to eight channels to the WavStation."
The price of the WavFarer begins at $15,000. One universal optical card is included in that price, so one channel can be turned up.
The Target Customer
LuxN executives say their optical access system should appeal to CLECs.
"We are interested in CLECs because they can take a leading edge technology and move quickly to install it," Park says. "But we are really interested in any service provider. We are interested in incumbents and anyone offering gigabit ethernet and storage area networking."
"One other market we are looking at is the Internet exchange market," Park says. "These are companies that colocate Internetoriented equipment at sites."
"LuxN is in a whole new optical access space where traditional sonet rings haven't worked," says Andrew Cray, research analyst at the Aberdeen Group, a high-tech consultancy in Boston. "There is a large amount of dark fiber in the ground, but no technology to make it usable. WavSystem solves that problem. Sonet doesn't really work for LAN interconnection -- it is not very cost- efficient. You will see fiber CLECs start selling services with the type of technology LuxN is offering."
(Andrew Cray, Aberdeen Group, 617/854-5279; Paul Strudwick, LuxN, 408/328-4500.) |
