I believe that for the real P-OTS, core or metro, just "handling Ethernet" is not good enough. What could it mean? Variety of Ethernet UNIs? Mapping Ethernet services onto SONET/SDH or ODUx tunnels? But that is not real Packet Transport. Smoke and Mirrors.
They're at the front of the whole, for lack of a better term, God Box that combines the Layer 2 and some of the Layer 0 functionality,"
I confess: I have no idea how you combine photon/electron level transport with something that involves a MAC address. I would have said the traditional thing: I use layer 0 (really layer 1) to implement my layer 2.
The system definitely supports DWDM. It does this through the use of pluggable XFP's. While this certainly can't match the performance of high-end 300-pin tunable based solutions, I'd say it does qualify it as DWDM capable.
The 1870 and the 1850 are both built with a universal/agnostic switching fabric that can do any mix of TDM switching and Ethernet/packet switching, so the abilities are definitely beyond Ethernet over SONET/SDH or over OTN. I agree that products that simply map Ethernet to TDM are not true packet-optical boxes.
Separately, on Andrew's point, my understanding is that the 1870 will be used initially with the 1830 to do DWDM transport, so, initially, the 1870 is a switch only.
It would be helpful if someone from ALU could chime in to clarify DWDM transport on the 1870. Any takers?
re: AlcaLu Joins the War for the Optical Core<div>Is this a larger version of the TSS product from ALU? It seems to marry the same sets of technologies in a much higher capacity package. </div> <div> </div> <div>It still needs to employ some sort of L2 or L3 circuit behavior using 802.1Qay or MPLS-TP/regular MPLS in order to statmux and keep the network from being just a big L2 switch... </div> <div> </div> <div> </div> <div> </div> <div> </div>
Glad we're in agreement. In regard to use of the agnostic fabric (it's actually packet fabric though very fast) I'd slightly modify "can do any mix" into "potentially can do any mix". I'm sceptical because of ability to support TDM services over the agnostic (packet) fabric in a scalable and cost effective way.
In todays packet core networks MPLS LSPs are used to connect service routers around the core with each other. Those LSPs provide virtual ports within the 10G, 40G and 100G physical interface ports.
With the ever growing bandwidth of these LSPs in the packet core networks it is becoming more efficient to migrate those LSPs to sub-Lambda Switched Paths (sLSPs). The 10G, 40G and 100G physical interface ports will then be equipped with sLSP based virtual ports.
The technology underlying those sLSPs is the ODUflex technology. These ODUflex connections start/end then in the service router. An example is described in http://www.huawei.com/broadban....
With the 40G and 100G physical interface modules for ethernet and OTN being the same devices, the change of virtual port technology does not change the principle architecture of the packet core from the viewpoint of the service router (LSPs are complemented and/or replaced by sLSPs, control plane is GMPLS). From the optical core perspective there is now no need to go to the packet level, keeping all processing on the layer 1 level.
Alcatel-Lucent has a White Paper: "Overcoming the cost-capacity crunch Implementing the intelligent Optical Transport Network (OTN) to face the "exaflood" phenomenon and support sustainable IP traffic growth", which describes the way 1870 will handle all different kinds of traffic. Take a look here.
If the 1870 switches packets like the 1850 did, it will be a disaster. Hopes are they upgraded the switch fabric enough (not just the chip) to handle it. My sources tell me the 1850 fell over with only slight increases in packet traffic. Bet Verizon will put it to a hard test soon, and we'll all find out if this works or not....
I believe that for the real P-OTS, core or metro, just "handling Ethernet" is not good enough. What could it mean? Variety of Ethernet UNIs? Mapping Ethernet services onto SONET/SDH or ODUx tunnels? But that is not real Packet Transport. Smoke and Mirrors.