Marvell Debuts "CarrierSpan" for Carrier Ethernet Networks

Marvell unveiled its “CarrierSpan” technology designed to ensure line rate service delivery with enhanced packet processors based on new and emerging standards (TR101, Mac-in-Mac, IP-VPN, VPWS, VPLS) in Metro Ethernet and carrier networks. Marvell said its CarrierSpan technology provides hardware assistance to insure five 9’s uptime with reduced overhead in Operations, Administration and Management (OAM) of the network. Integrated timing and synchronization capabilities enable inter-working with existing circuit switched networks. Additionally, CarrierSpan provides flexible uplink capabilities with hardware hooks for quality of service (QoS) interoperability to the access nodes, enabling a variety of service delivery architectures (xDSL, GPON, GEPON, Ethernet FTTx).

“Our CarrierSpan technology creates a solid foundation and flexible infrastructure for service delivery over carrier Ethernet and metro networks to better meet the needs of service providers,” said Dr. Simon Milner, vice president and general manager, enterprise business unit, communications and consumer business group at Marvell.

Marvell also announced the availability of its new Prestera 98DX2100 and 98DX4100 chips powered by the new CarrierSpan technology. Marvell’s new 98DX2100 and 98DX4100 family of processors is targeted for the various flavors of high-speed broadband access including PON, VDSL and native Ethernet, by including versatile sets of programmable interfaces. To support future scalability, the devices integrate four resilient FlexUplink ports programmed for any speed to support network upgrades from 1G to 2.5G to 10G. To minimize power dissipation and save on overall system cost, the integrated service processor has a built-in controller for high-speed 800M DDR2 memory and low-cost NAND flash. Sampling is underway.http://www.marvell.com