Applications

Overview

The rapid growth of the carrier Ethernet market is the result of new, industry-standard protocols that enable next-generation Ethernet equipment to operate with the circuit-like capabilities of existing TDM- and ATM-based platforms.

Many of the early carrier Ethernet platforms and line card implementations, however, have relied on costly Network Processors, FPGAs or internal ASICs to develop first-generation solutions to implement carrier Ethernet services. Another development option which has been attempted is to use enterprise Ethernet silicon and control plane software to implement carrier services, however, scaling and performance issues have occurred and that approach is quickly becoming obsolete.

At Lightstorm Networks we believe that the time is right for purpose-built Ethernet silicon switches optimized for the carrier market. In addition, by eliminating costly NPU programming with a robust hardware implementation of these standards, OEMs can quickly get their products to market at a fraction of the cost and be ensured of compliance to the latest MEF, IEEE and IETF standards.

The architecture from Lightstorm Networks is an ideal solution for these next-generation systems, which need to maintain high-performance switching as the number of carrier Ethernet services scale to meet the ever-increasing demands of service providers. Lightstorm offers comprehensive Layer 2 Ethernet switching and QoS traffic management that enables the delivery of E-Line and E-LAN services which meet stringent Ethernet service level agreements. In addition, Lightstorm offers robust Operations, Administration and Management (OAM) features and protection capabilities that increase platform availability while reducing OPEX.

A typical communications network is divided into three major segments: access, edge and core. There is a large installed base of TDM access equipment and SONET/SDH transport equipment at the edge and the core. Next-generation platforms are expected to leverage this installed base while taking advantage of the ease of use and cost effectiveness of Ethernet. At edge and aggregation points of carrier networks, this change is happening now and Lightstorm's 20Gbps carrier Ethernet switch is ideal for many edge aggregation or high-bandwidth platforms, including:

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