MUNICH -- Ethernet Europe -- Telco Systems (BATM) is capitalizing on all the talk of combining Carrier Ethernet and cloud services by introducing a box that could represent a new category of product -- the T-Metro 8000 carrier cloud gateway aggregation platform. (See Ethernet Europe's Magic Moments.)

The stats on the product are impressive: There's 1Tbit/s of capacity in a breadbox size unit -- OK, it's a 6RU chassis for you tech-heads -- and a 20Gbit/s non-blocking Ethernet switch in an edge aggregation device that can support 88 Gigabit Ethernet connections.

But what makes this an edge-of-the-cloud device -- the kind that can aggregate incoming traffic into a fat pipe that goes directly into the data center -- are the other things Telco Systems has chosen to put in. Those include MPLS at the edge for low-latency layer 2 VPNs and scalability of service, the company's EdgeGenie Service Management for end-to-end service management of Ethernet services, a variety of load-balancing options and integrated firewall and protection against denial of service attacks.

"This is designed for the edge of the cloud," says Greg Gum, Telco Systems's chief marketing and business development officer. Its first role will be to replace a variety of boxes used today, but the major hook is that it can allow the bandwidth scalability and flexibility that cloud services will require, he says.

"The time to provision, using EdgeGenie, is less than one minute," Gum says. "We want to minimize opex and let them manage more efficiently."

To support dynamic Ethernet services, the T-Metro 8000 supports load-balancing in a variety of ways including port-to-port, blade-to-blade and across the chassis.

Three service provider customers are already trialing the system, and Gum says Telco Systems is seeing broad interest from carriers. At Ethernet Europe, the Telco Systems product earned shoutouts from both event chair Stanley Hubbard, senior analyst with Heavy Reading, and Michael Howard, veteran analyst with Infonetics Research Inc. , who cited the T-Metro 8000 as one of the more interesting new products at the show.

— Carol Wilson, Chief Editor, Events, Light Reading