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To: jach who wrote (23133)	2/28/1999 12:04:00 AM
From: jach	Respond to of 77399

March 01, 1999, Issue: 1050 Section: Systems & Software ATM developers search for new metropolitan roles Loring Wirbel Warrendale, Pa. - Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switching is taking on more roles in carrier networks, with longtime vendors Fore Systems Inc. and Cabletron Systems Inc. adding optical-layer and advanced-routing protocol features to enhance ATM's multiservice capabilities. Fore, which demo'd a passive wave-division-multiplexing (WDM) front end for its ASX-4000 switch last fall, is shipping the passive mux systems with OC-48 interfaces, allowing the ASX-4000 to interface directly to WDM concentration equipment. Fore disclosed a pact with Osicom Technologies Inc. to offer consistent interfaces to Osicom's GigaMux WDM systems. The practical result of the move to WDM is the introduction of OC-48 line cards for the ASX4000 switch, which output to a small passive WDM system called the WMX-4. The feeder unit combines four OC-48c 2.5-Gbit/second channels to provide output of 10 Gbits/s on a single fiber. Brendan Hannigan, Fore's vice president of strategic marketing, said that when switching networks are set up with redundancy at the ATM layer, WDM can be used in the network without an intervening Sonet time-division layer. Fore is pulling in metropolitan service providers to its ATM switching architecture by stressing a multilayered approach. The company's approach advocates WDM at optical layers, cell switching at network layers and flow-management schemes like Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) at higher layers, in order to combine and aggregate different service types. ATM's PNNI (Private Network-Network Interface) protocols also play a role here, by allowing resilient re-route capabilities for ATM that mimic many of the functions of Sonet protection switching. Fore's backing of MPLS is a boost for Cisco Systems Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), which provided many of the "tag-switching" concepts that eventually led to the Internet Engineering Task Force's MPLS standard. Cisco's MGX 8850 switch, shown for the first time at the recent ComNet trade show, makes use of ATM Permanent Virtual Circuits for carrying routed traffic over ATM using MPLS services. Robert Redford, director of MGX marketing at Cisco, stresses that running PNNI and MPLS jointly over a unified Internet Protocol (IP) and ATM hardware-switching architecture is far more efficient than using the various encapsulation schemes developed for IP over ATM. Carriers are starting to understand, Redford said, that MPLS is more than a way to define IP flows over multiple hops; it also can make services easy to deploy across large areas and a more efficient way to use ATM hardware at the transport layer. Cabletron Systems Inc. (Rochester, N.H.), while not a true player in WAN backbones, is honing its strategic plan for combining ATM resources from its own product lines and those of the former Digital Equipment Corp., whose network-products group developed the GigaSwitch architecture. Cabletron's later acquisition of Yago Systems Inc. provided the Smart Switch Router architecture for Layer 3 and 4 backbone switching, and Cabletron's latest goal is to define a "best-of-breed" ATM program that combines architectures for enterprise and metropolitan nets. The route protocol of choice for Cabletron is MPOA (Multi-Protocol Over ATM), more appropriate for smaller-radius networks than MPLS. SmartSwitch 2040 and 6000 families can be outfitted with an embedded MPOA server functionality, and the server can be integrated directly into SmartSwitch Router. For backbone interconnect of SmartSwitch chassis units, Cabletron will offer two upgrades this spring: an OC-48 line card that uses single-mode fiber for a physical connection and PNNI as a re-route protocol; and the 5.4-Gbit/s ATM switching module for SmartSwitch 9500, which has an embedded i960 RISC processor and a switching fabric with four levels of priority queuing on the output buffers. Copyright ® 1999 CMP Media Inc.