James, I finally got to the Avici-Enron article, uplinked.
I viewed their composite trunking feature with some uncertainty, and feel that they could have been a little more generous with their explanations, to tell you the truth. I suppose that this would have to take place between two like Avicis, although one of their earlier claims was the ability to interoperate with any vendor's wares. Was that the same article? Whatever.
I'd like to see more data on this feature. I've copied the section of the article in question below. Comments would be welcome from you and others.
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Composite trunking
Hanks also cites Avici's composite trunking as a unique and attractive feature. "It lets you treat multiple ports on the router as if were a single port. You end up forwarding traffic across all the trunks instead of any one," he says. The effect occurs at layer three, and treats all the signals as one IP address.
"Because we treat them all as a single IP address, it simplifies the routing topology," Chadwick says. The technology also facilitates service restoration in the event of a fiber cut. Instead of having to reconfigure the routing table with addresses from, say, 16 routers, only one address needs to be reconfigured.
"Composite trunking makes it easier for the customer to take advantage of WDM," Chadwick says. In the 40 Gb/s example, a customer could fill 16 OC-48 ports of a DWDM system with signals from one IP address.
A terabit router rich with operations, maintenance, and provisioning capability pays for itself over the lifetime of the device by minimizing these efforts by technicians, suggests Current Analysis' Nicoll. "I think we're getting to a point beyond 'my box is bigger than your box' in the core router space," he observes. "You've got to have control and management functions built into the system to make it attractive to service providers." |
