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To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (1040)	1/28/2000 7:24:00 PM
From: ftth	Respond to of 1782

IronBridge router targets an optical coexistence. Electronic Engineering Times, Jan 24, 2000 p22 eetimes.com By Wirbel, Loring LEXINGTON, MASS. - IronBridge Networks Inc. has thrown its hat into the ring of startups aiming to build a terabit router. Recognizing that fast routers will have to coexist with second-generation optical transport equipment already entrenched in carrier networks, IronBridge is a founding member of the Optical Domain Service Interoperability coalition, announced last week (see Jan. 17, page 1). While carriers will want to keep routers and optical cross-connects in physically separate platforms for some time, Carl Blume, director of product marketing, said that the drive toward integration has led IronBridge to launch several new optical interconnect technologies, such as the Poco (packet over cheap optics) transport used internally within its router. Trials on tap IronBridge has tested out three of four packet-processing ASICs for its terabit router. Once the fourth device is ready, later this month, the system will be able to move into early trials. Its traffic-engineering software currently is under test at a major Boston-area Internet service provider. IronBridge has received $63 million in funding from a variety of firms, yet it's been one of the quietest of the terarouter startups. Its founders include Kathleen Huber, former manager of the Defense Data Network and developer of the BBN gigarouter; Steve Bielagus, former vice president of engineering at Proteon Corp.; and Ross Callon, a primary author of the PNNI and multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) protocol specs. Huber is IronBridge's vice president of product development; Bielagus, vice president of engineering; and Callon, chief systems architect. Two key demands drove the IronBridge router design, said Blume: a need to minimize optoelectronic conversions among all telco equipment inside a central office, and a need to embed support for protection switching, formerly implemented in Sonet termination nodes. The router's switch fabric interconnect must scale both in a single rack-mounted system and across multiple platforms, Blume said. It must support advanced bandwidth provisioning and quality-of-service protocols like MPLS, but also scale for integration with all-optical switching. But the fabric itself is centralized, Blume said, unlike the distributed mesh used in some router architectures. IronBridge plans a layer of traffic-engineering software above its intelligent fabric ASICs. Blume said the software will take advantage of Label-Switched Path features from the MPLS spec, as well as constraint-based routing methodologies. These traffic-management features will be implemented dynamically and automatically, so that optimal end-to-end paths are chosen for traffic without any intervention by carrier or end user. The intent of such complex traffic engineering is not only to make it easy to create multitiered service-level agreements, but also to allow full wholesaling of bandwidth among different carriers and service providers. IronBridge has developed specific algorithms for redistributing traffic, including methods of aggregating traffic such as virtual trunking groups. The router will offer hardware support for type-of-service byte translation, unique in the terarouter industry, Blume said.