Alcatel-Lucent introduced its 7750 SR-a edge router – a hardware platform designed for high density, high performance aggregation of mobile backhaul, business and residential services.
The new platform, which extends the company’s 7750 Service Router family and leverages the company’s FP3 400G Network Processor, targets fixed, mobile and cable operators, governments and enterprises.
The 7750 SR-a is powered by Alcatel-Lucent’s Service Router Operating System (SR OS) and managed by the 5620 Service Aware Manager (5620 SAM). It offers class-leading GE and 10GE density with high-performance 40G and 100GE interface investment protection. Oversubscription allows providers to efficiently and cost-effectively support the changing traffic demands of a mix of customers – LTE Advanced and small cell mobile backhaul, business VPN, datacenter and cloud-based services and residential broadband services.
The 7750 SR-a is available in two variants:
- The 4-slot 7750 SR-a4 offering 200G system throughput capacity
- The 8-slot 7750 SR-a8 offering 400G system throughput capacity
“We are committed to delivering product innovations that bridge a gap in the market. The 7750 SR-a will allow providers to go closer to the customer to meet their exploding traffic demands across the network. Despite its compact size, by leveraging the FP3 network processor we are not compromising on scalability, functionality or quality of service – it offers performance beyond its size and drives down costs at the same time,” stated Basil Alwan, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Routing & Transport business line.
Last week, Alcatel-Lucent unveiled a Virtualized Service Router (VSR) built on Intel silicon and implementing its Service Router Operator System (SROS) and managed by the 5620 Service Aware Manager (SAM).
The addition of an Alcatel-Lucent virtualized edge router running on x86 accelerates the industry’s shift to network functions virtualization (NFV), enabling service providers to build more flexible infrastructure that scales with cloud technologies. Over 20 trials are underway with carriers and two contracts have already been won.
The virtualized router is positioned as an addition to the company’s routing hardware family. Alcatel-Lucent continues to develop its custom ASICs for powering the higher performance routers.
Alcatel-Lucent’s Virtualized Service Router (VSR) will implement its full, non-stop routing code. Significantly, the company said it was able to optimize the code so as to deliver 2X the routing performance compared to other virtual routers on x86. The performance gains are achieved by leveraging parallel processing across multiple core on Intel’s Xeon processors. Alcatel-Lucent has a development partnership with Intel. In data plane performance, the VSR is able to hit 160G throughput in a 2RU x86 server.
In addition, while others have focused on delivering one or two router virtual network functions, Alcatel-Lucent will deliver a suite of router applications. One of the first applications is a Virtualized Route Reflector, which the company says has achieved 8x the performance in the control plane over competitor offers.
Some highlights:
- VSR-RR: The industry’s highest performance virtualized Route Reflector. Available now.
- VSR-SIM: The full IP-MPLS software-based router simulator. Available now.
- VSR-PE: The Virtualized Provider Edge delivering Carrier Ethernet and IPN services. Available for demonstration now and commercially available during the first half of 2015.
- VSR-AA: The Virtualized Application Assurance delivers application-based value added services and application-level reporting and traffic management. Available for demonstration now and commercially available during the first half of 2015.
- VSR-SEGW: The Virtualized IP Security Gateway will be available for demonstration during the first half of 2015.
- VSR-WLGW: The Virtualized Wireless LAN Gateway will be available for demonstration during the second half of 2015.
- VSR-BNG: The Virtualized Broadband Network Gateway will be available for demonstration during the second half of 2015.
