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<Picture><Picture><Picture><Picture: Today's News>ÿÿÿ September 8, 1997, 5:25 p.m. ET.
Start-up Pushes QoS Envelope
By SAROJA GIRISHANKAR
Yago Systems Inc., whose founders sometime joke it stands for Yet Another Gigabit Operation, will ship a gigabit switching router early next year that lets IT managers allocate network resources down to individual applications and expand quality of service (QoS) and remote management to users of corporate extranets.
The switching router, which will be announced tomorrow, builds upon new Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chips that integrate application-level prioritization and policy- and flow-management. Other networking hardware vendors are expected to follow suit.
Cisco also plans to upgrade its line of routers and switches with new ASICs, which sources said are coming from MMC Networks Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif. Rapid CityCommunications, a Bay Networks division, said it has many of the policy functions.
Both the Yago device and the Cisco upgrades promise to let IT managers decide which users get access to what applications and which particular application of an individual user gets priority over others.
The Yago product goes a step further and provides detailed application-level accounting and statistics to track and bill usage. And there's a bonus. Because these capabilities are integrated on the chips, packets will continue to travel at wire speeds of 10 megabits per second and 100 Mbps.
"What we are offering is the ability to do quality of service, security and RMON 2 functions at the application level while guaranteeing wire speeds up to 100 megabits per second to desktop," said Piyush Patel, president and CEO of Yago Systems.
These flow- and policy-management capabilities by themselves are not totally new. Several routing and switching products already offer certain levels of QoS, such as prioritization and guaranteed bandwidth between subnets and backbone networks. Some, such as Cisco's existing NetFlow management module, also offer certain levels of access control and prioritization for applications. But what has been missing has been the ability to do very granular lookup of packets to provide scalable flow, security and policy management without performance degradations.
The Yago development team is composed of old hands at internetworking. Romulus Pereira, Yago's chief technology officer and vice president of engineering, and Nilesh Shah, the company's director of hardware engineering, were both part of Cisco's Fusion architecture and Gigabit Ethernet switching architecture groups, respectively. And Patel was with Intel and Sun Microsystems.
According to Pereira, Yago's first product, Multilayer Switching Router (MSR) 8000, will be showcased at the NetWorld+Interop '97 show next month. The gigabit switching router can handle up to 30 million packets per second and support as many as 10,000 users. The device will provide Web-based management for accounting, tracking, security and RMON 2 management. In addition, Java-based applications for configuring and monitoring will be available through browser front ends using templates and intuitive wizards.
Pricing for Yago's MSR 8000 is $500 per port for 100-Mbps ports and $1,500 to $2,000 for gigabit ports.
<Picture>
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Previous Headlines
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Cabletron to enter gigabit router game
------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Jodi Daniels
09/15/97
Cabletron Systems, Inc. is about to get a whole new look.
The hub and switch maker plans to break from its routerless past and
roll out a gigabit switching router by mid-1998, according to sources close
to Cabletron.
Nearer term, the company will unveil a family of Gigabit Ethernet
modules for its existing switches and hubs at NetWorld+Interop 97 in
Atlanta next month.
While gigabit gear has been expected, the router plan caught observers
by surprise. After all, what does Cabletron know about building routers?
Well, it knows enough to look for help, which explains why the company
has taken what sources estimated to be a 20% to 40% stake in router
start-up YAGO Systems, Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif. Cabletron confirmed that
it has invested in YAGO, but declined to disclose the extent of the
investment.
'This would give Cabletron, for the first time, a router story,' said
Skip MacAskill, an analyst with consultancy Gartner Group, Inc. in
Stamford, Conn. 'We've been trying to tell Cabletron for years that they
need routing, so to see Cabletron acknowledge the fact that routers are a
key partof users networks as they move forward is very positive.
What about SecureFast?
The flip side is that Cabletron has spent lots of time and money
championing its SecureFast strategy, which preaches flattening out the
network using the company's 'route one, switch many' scheme. In fact,
Cabletron next year is planning to enhance SecureFast to support
'packet-by-packet' Layer 3 switching, which is a more scalable approach.
But SecureFast switches - based on Cabletron's proprietary routing protocol
- are quite different from YAGO's full-blown router offering.
The YAGO box is a fast router that speaks traditional routing
protocols such as Open Shortest Path First and Border Gateway Protocol 4.
So the biggest issue - if Cabletron moves forward with the YAGO deal
via an OEM agreement or possibly a straight acquisition - will be how this
new gigabit switching router fits into the SecureFast scheme, industry
observers said.
MacAskill anticipates that Cabletron will offer a two-pronged strategy.
'Cabletron can go in heavy with SecureFast for those clients that
like the idea of flattening out the network and using its virutal routing
services, and [Cabletron] can play the Layer 3 game for router-centric
clients,' he said.
Analysts speculated that Cabletron's Spectrum net management platform
would play a role in linking the different technologies.
Getting to know YAGO
The YAGO technology is a hardware-based switching rout-er capable of
switching traffic - at Layer 2, 3 and 4 - at gigabit rates on all ports.
Layer 4 switching - expected to be the next evolution of the switching
craze - is a key feature of YAGO's MSR 8000 backbone router. The device -
which will be on display at NetWorld+ Interop 97 - extends beyond
traditional router functionality by switching Layer 4 (transport layer)
application flows. This al-lows the device to make switch decisions based
on the applications a business is using.
Most protocols such as HTTP, File Transfer Protocol and Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol - which are used in certain applications - have a unique
'socket number' at Layer 4 that the YAGO device will be able to identify
and use to provide greater application-specific policy control.
For example, a net manager looking at a Layer 3 flow can only control
one computer talking to another computer, irrespective of what applications
he is using. But by going to a Layer 4 - or socket-based - flow, a net
manager can assign an e-mail application a different policy than a database
application.
Piece of the puzzle
But the YAGO device would be just one piece of Cabletron's switch
puzzle. Also at Interop, Cabletron will unveil a suite of Gigabit Ethernet
switching products, including adapter cards and switch modules for the
company's MMAC-Plus backbone chassis, Smart-Switch 6000 wiring closet
switch and SmartSwitch 2000 workgroup device.
In addition, Cabletron will announce that its existing MMAC-Plus
two-port Gigabit Ethernet switch module now adheres to the existing Gigabit
Ethernet prestandard.
But there is no doubt that the gigabit switching router would be a key
weapon in Cabletron's arsenal.
A Cabletron-YAGO partnership would be yet another example of the big
internetwork vendors lining up with Layer 3 players to go after giant Cisco
Systems, Inc. Recently, Bay Networks, Inc. acquired Rapid City
Communications, Inc., and rumors are swirling that 3Com Corp. is working
with Extreme Networks, Inc.
Cabletron: (603) 332-9400; YAGO: (408) 774-2900
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