IronBridge Hammers Out High-Speed Network Gear

LEXINGTON, MASS. (02/24/2000) - As if enterprise customers haven't heard enough about terabit router startups and how their equipment will foster a new generation of data services . . . well, get ready to listen again.

IronBridge Networks, the quiet startup, is getting ready to roar with a box designed to bring virtual private networks (VPN) and converged voice, data and video services to enterprise networks by tightly integrating terabit routing with optical switching.

IronBridge has been around for more than two years. But instead of talking about products a year ahead of field trials or showing unpowered sheet metal in trade show booths, IronBridge is shedding its skin now because the company not only has something to say, it also has something to show.

"Everything important happens between now and the end of the year," says company president and CEO Paul Lazay, referring to a terabit router that's three weeks ahead of schedule and six months from reaping revenue for IronBridge. Lazay was like a kid on Christmas morning because IronBridge had just received ASICs from LSI Logic that enable the router to maintain sessions with Cisco Systems Inc.'s venerable 7500 router.

The IronBridge router - the name of which the company did not disclose in an exclusive briefing with Network World two weeks ago - will end alpha testing in April, enter beta testing in late June or early July, and will ship by the end of September, Lazay says.

The box features 16 60G-bps shelves for an aggregate switching capacity of 960G bit/sec. The routers also features a 44G-bps fiber optic bus called POCO - Packets Over Cheap Optics - for interconnecting multiple switch fabrics into a multiterabit system and for connecting the router to dense wave division multiplexing optical cross-connects in the core of the Internet.

Typically, terabit-class routers use SONET ports to connect to optical cross-connects, which deprives service providers of revenue from using those ports to deliver service, Lazay says. The POCO bus unlocks those revenue-generating ports while providing a migration path to optical switching, he says.

Indeed, IronBridge plans to replace the electrical central switch fabric in its routers to an optical central switch in three years, Lazay says.

"In the next three years, we'll go from a terabit router with optical ports to an optical switch with terabit-routing ports," he says.

Such integrated optical networking will facilitate easier service provisioning and - with the help of IronBridge management software - intelligent traffic engineering by selecting optimal paths and balancing loads by setting up virtual trunk groups, Lazay says.

This will make it easier for service providers to quickly turn up new IP services, such as Multi-protocol Label Switching-based VPNs and service-level agreements for converged multimedia traffic, Lazay claims.

The IronBridge router is likely to sport OC-48 and OC-192 interfaces when it ships this fall, sources say, but IronBridge marketing managers were mum on these details.

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