All Mangrove systems have hybrid packet and TDM switching fabrics. The smallest Piranha 100 is a 1U box with Gigabit Ethernet or 155-Mbit Sonet uplinks. The multislotted Piranha 600 adds NEBS hardening and full 1+1 redundancy. Barracuda is the central-office chassis aggregating DS-3, Sonet rates from OC-3 to OC-192, and Ethernet at 1- and 10-Gbit rates. The secret sauce of the Mangrove engine is a double layer of encapsulation using PWE3 and GFP.
Turin, an early advocate of both data-aware Sonet and G-MPLS, needed a multiservice "pizza box" at the edge to take on Ethernet-centric access companies looking to displace TDM and ATM multiplexers. Director of marketing Kevin Wade said the edge was converging on a simple platform priced at $5,000 to $10,000, but that carriers needed better support for GFP and virtual concatenation. The TraverseEdge 100 Sonet add-drop multiplexer (ADM) also integrates Layer 2 Ethernet switching.
In theory, the system would compete with edge boxes, but the arrival of circuit emulators from the packet world will complicate matters a bit. "We see vendors like Overture, Covaro and Luminous trying to aggregate the various services through circuit emulation," Wade said. "But it's not certain they'll end up being a direct competition at the edge."
Mahi, for its part, is melding its original multiservice provisioning platform with a reconfigurable optical ADM from the newly acquired Photuris. Mahi CEO Chris Rust said the combination of the Mahi Mi7 and the Photuris Vx7 allowed the hybrid transport/switching architecture to scale to "hundreds of rings with tens of subtended add-drop multiplexers."
Mahi says its solution spans Layers 0 to 2+, incorporating TDM grooming and packet switching without attempting to move to true Layer 3 routing. The Mi7 and Vx7 are augmented with special line cards and software to serve specific dedicated applications. The Mi7 alone has been optimized for metro Ethernet transport, broadband convergence gateways and edge packet aggregation. By adding the Vx7, Mahi can enhance its Sonet ring aggregation as well as offer an extended service reach over the very long haul.
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