[Thanks to Frank C. for this post.]
I would think FTEL's DVG is considered an "edge" product, so is this Redstone package a real threat to the hardware side of our business? Thanks.
Buzz
Policing Bandwidth -- Improvements At Edge Deliver Richer QoS
[[a different take on the same Redstone Communications release]]
October 13, 1998
INTERNETWEEK via NewsEdge Corporation : Service providers are living on the edge-the edge of their networks, that is.
The growing demand for value-added IP services, such as voice over IP and virtual private networking, is forcing service providers t o re-examine the functionality of their edge devices. Before IT managers can buy these next-generation services, experts say, the ed ge devices must become faster, more scalable and better at delivering quality-of-service (QoS) capabilities.
To fill that bill, Redstone Communications Inc. this week will announce the RX Internet Edge Router, a "special-purpose router" for the edge of carrier networks. The product's speed and QoS flow classification capabilities are needed to guarantee multiple tiers of
service for business applications, said Lisa Allocca, a senior consultant at Renaissance Worldwide Inc., a networking consultancy.
The new product hits the sweet spot for many service providers. "The edge is the place where vendors need to focus," said Jack Waters, vice president of network engineering at national service pro vider Level 3 Communications Inc. "It's where we spend most of our money."
Today's high-end routers, many of them designed for the backbone of carrier networks, just aren't the right fit at the edge. "We want the core equipment to switch packets, and the edge equipment to do other
things, like prioritization and accounting," Water s said.
Redstone's new routers are aimed at incumbent routers like the Cisco 7500 and comparable units such as Ascend Communications Inc.'s MAX and TNT. Redstone contends that these general-purpose routers might have the performance to play at the edge, but won't scale wh en QoS services are deployed.
Several factors are fueling the shift in demands on edge equipment. For one, the nature of the traffic is changing. Before the Web b ecame popular, the bulk of Internet traffic was made up of e-mail and file transfers. In those days, a typical packet was about 2KB in size, according to Jim Dolce, Redstone's president and CEO.
Today, Web surfing is the predominant application. "This means lots of TCP sessions, which means lots of acknowledgments," Dolce sai d. And that means lots of small packets-around 40 bytes in size -are passing over the Internet.
MCI proved this change in average packet size in a study last year. The company monitored packets passing over a link between Boston and Reston, Va., and published the results in an IEEE Network publication last November. According to the study, about half of all packets were between zero and 44 bytes. Another 28 percent of the packets were between 45 and 552 bytes.
This decline in average packet size is likely to continue with the introduction of voice-over-IP services, which require packet size s of about 80 bytes or less in order to reduce latency.
The trend toward smaller packets is putting a heavy strain on existing edge devices. To forward a packet, a router has to examine ea ch header regardless of the packet's size. If there are smaller packets but more of them, the router must work that much harder.
The Internet also is putting a heavy burden on edge devices, experts said. As the volume of traffic increases, providers will have t o aggregate a rapidly growing number of ports at their points of presence.
"That means any QoS mechanism needs to scale big," Waters said. "There have to be a lot of performance and capabilities at the edge. " For example, Level 3 terminates hundreds of customers, but in the future, the provider hopes to terminate thousands, he said.
Service providers must support heavier traffic and more, smaller packets at the edge,but most existing high-end carrier backbone ro uters are not capable of performing the intelligent packet handling functions required to support tiered service offerings that offer different service level guarantees, Redstone officials said.
Core routers typically rely on ASIC technology to derive their high packet-forwarding rates, Redstone officials said. But ASIC-based architectures are not as flexible as the new generation of edge devices when it comes to doing chores like prioritizing packets,
placing them in outbound queues, and collecting accounting and billing information, they said.
Redstone's position echoes statements made by many industry leaders, such as Qwest Communications International Inc.'s president and CEO Joseph Nacchio. These industry leaders said that more intelligence needs must be added at the edge devices before provider networks will be able to scale up and offer value-added IP services.
The Redstone RX line will ship in the first quarter of 1999. Its starting price is expected to be $49,950.
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