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Editor's Perspective
The Mod squad
By Tim McElligott
Feb. 20, 2007
Someday, if its provider backbone transport (PBT) ever becomes the
technology of choice for point-to-point communication and replaces MPLS
in segments like metro networks, Nortel Networks could have the last
laugh in the router market. But that's a pretty big if--and so far,
there's nothing funny about what Nortel has done to its router
business.
And although nobody is laughing these days, a few smiles are beginning
to break out on the faces of those working for vendors in the
multi-service edge router space. While the core router market dropped
9%
in 2006, the edge market grew by 58% year-over-year, according to
Dittberner Associates.
One of the reasons for the growth was the increased need to support
advanced services such as IPTV and voice over IP. In order to support
these services, router manufacturers have had to solve some serious
architectural problems in products they designed primarily for the
enterprise world. Namely, and at the risk of using a cliché, they
had to make their products carrier-grade. To do this, they had to find
a
way to make them upgradeable in live networks and to compartmentalize
processes and applications so that when one had a problem, they didn't
all hold hands and jump off the cliff together. In other words, they
had
to modularize their operating systems.
Some vendors have come out of the box this way; others have had to work
a little harder at it. And one, the market leader, has had to find ways
to keep competitors at bay (no relation to the router company Nortel
acquired then ran into the ground) while it gets as much as it can from
its embedded base of non-modular edge routers.
The biggest winners here may not be the router vendors at all. It may
be
the service providers who have dreamed long and hard about the day they
would not have to reboot an entire router or reseat an interface card
just to clear a software problem. Service providers have also dreamed
of
the day they could upgrade to the latest software release and not lose
sleep over the possibility that their routers would fail to come back
up
before the maintenance window expired--or worse, never.
Peace of mind is a powerful selling tool. But in the networking world,
it hasn't always been an easy sell. The articles below show that this
is
starting to change.
E-mail me at tmcelligott@telephonyonline.com.
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Feature
Giving the boot to
re-boot
By Tim McElligott
Feb. 20, 2007
Fault-tolerant router design opened the door to the carrier market for
rival vendors looking to take the edge off Cisco's market dominance.
And
the edge is where they started...
(Click on the link above or scroll down for the full-length
feature)
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In the Spotlight
Boom time for edge
routing
By Tim McElligott
Feb. 20, 2007
A quarterly report released last week by Dittberner Associates called
"Multiservice Switch and Router Market Analysis" showed fourth-quarter
revenue for the edge router market growing by 11% from the previous
quarter. This capped a year-over-year growth spurt of 58% for this
segment. Edge routing now accounts for 64% of the router market.
Dittberner research analyst James Heath spoke with Telephony's
Tim McElligott about the role modular operating systems are playing in
this space...
(Click on the link above or scroll down for the full-length
interview)
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Feature (Full-length)
Giving the boot to re-boot
By Tim McElligott
Feb. 20, 2007
Fault-tolerant router design opened the door to the carrier market
for rival vendors looking to take the edge off Cisco's market
dominance.
And the edge is where they started.
Packet routing technology has revolutionized networking--no doubt about
that. But in at least one way, routers have fallen short of
expectations
for telecommunications service providers spoiled by the resiliency of
their world-class, circuit-switched networks: high availability. Here
we
will look at how modular operating systems have closed both the
resiliency gap and the gap between market leaders in the multi-service
edge routing space.
What is a modular operating system? Like the IP multimedia subsystem
(IMS) and the esoteric metric known as quality-of-service, the modular
OS has many definitions. Their differences lay primarily in the level,
or depth, of modularity designed into the software code. It could be as
simple as compartmentalizing the control plane and the forwarding
plane,
or as complex as building different modules for each protocol a router
supports or process it performs.
There are no standards for modularity. The router OS more than the
hardware is where vendors find their differentiation, and each follows
its own path. But one thing is sure, said Michael Howard, principal
analyst and co-founder of Infonetics Research: "The only way you can
achieve true high-availability is with a modular operating system."
Most router suppliers claim they already provide the requisite
five-nines (99.999%) reliability, which is as good as traditional
telecom network equipment, so why the need for more? When it comes to
network maintenance, carriers seldom reboot a Class 5 switch or a
signal
transfer point. It is too disruptive to the network and to customers,
and it has a direct impact on revenue. But too often, historically, the
fix in the router world has been--much like the PC world--to reboot.
Modularity in the OS solves this problem. Its two primary benefits are
that it allows problems in a particular module to be isolated to that
module and fixed while the router maintains services through other
modules, and that it allows network operators to apply new software
releases without taking the router out of service. So long, maintenance
window.
Infonetics Research reported that downtime in large enterprise networks
costs businesses 2% to 16% of their revenue. And software more than
hardware is the culprit in the majority of downtime. Carriers can't
stand for that--thus the phrase "carrier-grade."
Howard said his firm surveyed 27 major service providers around the
world (those with average revenue over $16 billion last year) and found
that the No. 1 capability they wanted in their purchase of IP edge
routers is high-availability and non-stop services. And the No. 1
feature of core routers is a modular operating system.
The desire for such a configuration opened doors for companies such as
Redback Networks and Juniper Networks to chip away at the market
dominance of Cisco, which only recently began bringing modularity to
market. An IDC study published in December for the third quarter of
2006
showed that Cisco still commands 51% of the worldwide IP edge router
market. Alcatel (with Lucent reported separately) had 16%, Juniper 14%
and Redback 6%.
Dittberner showed Cisco a couple of percentage points lower by the
fourth quarter, but said the company's edge router revenue grew by 100%
year-over-year. It had Juniper at 12%, Alcatel-Lucent at 24% and
Redback
at 4%.
Howard said the modular OS is now a requirement for the market, and
that
Cisco may have finally closed the window of opportunity for any more
new
entrants by catching up with the modular concept in the latest release
of its IOC XR software. Still, "You can bet that Juniper and Redback
used that in their sales strategies when they first started," he said.
They still do. With such a huge embedded base, Cisco has a long way to
go to get its customers transitioned to a new modular architecture.
Competitors are counting on this time to make up as much ground as they
can.
"That's what allowed us to get into so many of the top service
providers," said Ravi Medikonda, director of product marketing for
Redback. "We were one of the first to bring this type of product to
market in late 2002 and early 2003. Today, 12 of the top 27 providers
around the world have deployed our edge routers and modular OS."
Redback also claims to have 700 service provider customers in more than
80 countries. Its carrier clout, especially in the wireless segment,
could get stronger now that Redback has become a subsidiary of
Ericsson.
However, the whole competitive landscape in this market could change
soon with this and other acquisitions and mergers. The combination of
Ericsson and Redback will now be in a stronger position to compete with
Alcatel-Lucent, and soon to with the combined Nokia and Siemens.
One thing that will remain the same is that these companies will be
competing for the foreseeable future on the depth and design of their
modular operating systems and how easily those are implemented for
real-time services.
Redback is primarily an edge router provider. It is unclear at this
point whether Ericsson will attempt to take it more into the network
core, but either way, the modular design is getting to be a
requirement.
A key component of a modular OS, one which Redback follows with its
Smart Edge Operating System (SEOS,) is to make each process
re-startable
individually rather than having to restart entire systems or boards,
which may contain other processes or applications.
Hardware has its own high-availability story, but as it allows for the
consolidation of more functionality such as access aggregation, IP/MPLS
PE routing and broadband remote access server (B-RAS), the software has
to step up and prevent multiple process failures on any given system
board or processor. According to a Redback white paper, the most
important operation requiring high availability is user-data
forwarding.
This is done from both hardware and software angles through the
separation of control and data traffic This way activities such as
packet inspection, packet forwarding, packet metering and routing table
logic can reside on a line card and routing, signaling and management
can run on a control card.
As Medikonda said, physical redundancy is fine for non-real-time
applications like e-mail and file transfers. But on top of hardware
designs, software can be used to increase high availability in a couple
of basic ways. Duke University defines them as error processing and
fault treatment. Every vendor has its own method for achieving these,
but error processing provides the ability to remove errors from the
software state or compensate for those errors by adding redundancy.
Fault treatment prevents the activation of faults by taking action
before the errors reach a critical point.
The modular design adds to that the ability to prevent a fault in one
process from traveling to another process, because each process is an
independent thread with its own protected memory.
Effectiveness of modularity depends on the size of the modules created,
Infonetics' Howard said. But Jim Sugg, director of product management
at
Juniper, says it is in the design and implementation.
"Anything being sold today is modular at some level, so the biggest
benefits are hard to see," he said, referring to such things as
better-organized code, a more well-organized development organization
and a predictable release schedule.
All the benefits modularity provides internally to a vendor directly
translate into benefits for the carriers. For example, Sugg said,
better-organized code means that Juniper can track who is directly
responsible for certain sections of code. And accountability leads to
fewer faults.
"When you divide large sets of complex code into understandable parts,
it is easier to maintain, easier and faster to add features and is less
likely to cause problems in other areas," Sugg said.
He said a modular design is important and that Juniper launched its
first generation of products based on it, but, "it's not whether you
are
modular or not, but how that architectural decision is expressed in a
particular implementation. That's where you start seeing some
differentiation."
While a modular design has greatly increased availability of routers
and
thereby of the network, it hasn't always done much for service
degradation or traffic overloads due to malicious attacks. "We have
seen
in earlier systems where if a router was getting hit with a lot of
traffic and there was a lot of change going on in the control plane,
the
router would drop traffic it wouldn't have otherwise," Sugg said.
Juniper chose to design the forwarding plane so it could keep up with
any requests or packet size and do the packet forwarding even when the
control plane was under heavy load.
These are the type of architectural choices router manufacturers have
to
make: how much modularity is required for any particular task. As Sugg
said, "There are lots of architectural choices you can make, and the
customer requirement for reliability is only going up."
Driving those requirements are real-time voice and video services that
have service providers asking about six-nines reliability.
As Kevin DeNuccio, president and CEO of Redback, said at the time the
Ericsson acquisition was announced, "Video changes everything."
While Cisco is comparatively late in the game with getting a modular
OS-based product to market, particularly in edge routing, it
nonetheless
has gained some market share in the IPTV segment. It jumped 2% in the
third quarter of 2006 to command 65.2% of the market. Redback also
gained slightly, while Alcatel lost 2.1% and Juniper stayed even,
according to Synergy Research Group.
The total addressable market for edge routing in IPTV was approximately
$446 million. The core is worth $221 million. Cisco's dominance in this
market may have less to do with router design than with its product
suite and ecosystem. Cisco announced a partnership recently with SES
Americom, the satellite video provider for rural telcos whereby Cisco
will act as a chief infrastructure supplier and integrator for rural
telcos through the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative.
Cisco has made a string of acquisitions for IPTV including
Scientific-Atlanta (for set-top boxes) and Arroyo Systems (for
video-on-demand). It also added a video-caching appliance to its 7600
family of routers and has invested in Akimbo Systems, a video-on-demand
content provider. With the help of its ecosystem of partners, Cisco
will
supply encoding, encapsulation, third-party middleware, scrambling and
de-scrambling, satellite receivers, conditional access and more.
This proves there are other ways to attack the market than touting a
modular OS, but it is likely a short-term advantage. The importance of
high availability in the video world will require nothing less than the
level of reliability only a modular OS (on top of a high-availability
hardware platform) can provide.
This is not all to say that modular OSs are immune to trouble, as
evidenced in Cisco's recent revelation about a MPLS-related
vulnerabilities its IOS XR platform. Systems running Cisco IOS XR and
configured for MPLS were vulnerable to exploitation through a modular
services card on a Cisco Carrier Routing System 1 or a line card on a
Cisco 12000 series router, which would cause it to reload and affect
switched traffic.
However, because of the router's modular design, the vulnerability
could
be addressed without taking down the CRS-1. And that's the whole point.
Back to Top
In the Spotlight
(Full-length)
Boom time for edge routing
By Tim McElligott
Feb. 20, 2007
A quarterly report released last week by Dittberner Associates called
"Multiservice Switch and Router Market Analysis" showed fourth-quarter
revenue for the edge router market growing by 11% from the previous
quarter. This capped a year-over-year growth spurt of 58% for this
segment. Edge routing now accounts for 64% of the router market.
Dittberner research analyst James Heath spoke with Telephony's
Tim McElligott about the role modular operating systems are playing in
this space.
On the benefits of a modular OS: The primary benefits are
simple:
An application can fail, and it doesn't pull down all the other
applications running on the router. It's like your PC--when you have a
problem with the browser, it shuts down, but it doesn't shut down that
Excel spreadsheet you're working on. Because 90% of failures are
software-related, partitioning the operating system really reduces the
impact of failures on everybody--especially on the edge, where you
don't
always have a redundant path.
It also makes the upgrade process better. Cisco's old IOS system, for
example, used to require a complete cutover of software on all the
routers at once. But with the CRS-1 now using a modular OS, they can do
it router by router. They have had big problems in the past where
people
trying to do upgrades have brought the whole network down.
On the window of opportunity the modular OS represents: I
believe
one of the big functional advantages of Alcatel's 7750 multi-service
edge router and Redback's Smart Edge is that they use modular software
on the edge. Cisco has made a lot of improvements in terms of feature
functionality, but they haven't gotten anywhere near the functionality
of the Alcatel or Redback modular systems. And Juniper had a number of
things that gave it market share. One is that they never even had that
software upgrade issue. They were modular from the beginning.
It's the right market to be in right now. The edge market is up to
about
64% of the router business. A year and a half ago, it was 50/50 with
the
core. So competitors have racked up some great numbers.
On the next level of differentiation once everyone is modular at the
edge: I would say a differentiator above and beyond modular is
having a backup software image. Alcatel has two software images, and
when there is a failure it switches to the backup and you don't get the
performance glitches of a single software image. It goes beyond
modular,
but you have to ask yourself, "at what cost?" I don't know if all
service providers are willing to pay for that.
I don't know if Alcatel just happened to be in the right place when the
apple dropped or whether they planned for it. I doubt they planned for
it; I think they were thinking of a high-availability system like
Redback and others, and it just so happened that the trend moved toward
real-time applications, which is where we are starting to see the need
for added availability.
On the impact of real-time data: As you know, TCP/IP data was
very tolerant of failures and time delays. The worst that happened was
you had to wait for a window to load. But when you start running
telephone conversations and real-time applications like IPTV, it
becomes
unacceptable to the consumer.
The average bandwidth needed for Web surfing is something like 50 kb/s.
It's pretty small. You put in a request, then you read a page--but when
you start putting TV on there, you need between 2 Mb/s and 20 Mb/s, and
you need it for as long as the TV program is on. Heck, kids leave TVs
on
18 hours a day, so that's a lot of bandwidth.
I'm sure that will be worked out down the road, but I don't think that
has been well thought-out in the industry. A lot of service providers
will find out it's not just as simple as building an ADSL
infrastructure
that handles Web surfing and then popping a headend in for IPTV
capability.
If you are going to be in the edge router business, those types of
services are going to make you upgrade the reliability and non-stop
performance of your product.
Modularity is a requirement largely because we are going to be doing
real-time applications that are going to be on for long periods of
time.
Even a telephone conversation lasts two or three minutes.
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