IPSILON Networks Introduces First IP Switch, Designed Specifically to Accelerate IP Networking; 'Boosts IP Performance Fivefold For a Fraction of the Cost of Conventional Devices'

Business Wire, March 4, 1996

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 4, 1996--Ipsilon Networks, a new Silicon Valley internetworking company, has developed the first switching system designed specifically to deliver a quantum leap in price/performance for IP networks.

Called an IP Switch, this new product category combines the intelligence and control of IP routing with the high speed and capacity of ATM switching into a single scalable platform. The flagship release, the IP Switch ATM 1600, supports a switching capacity of up to 5.3 million IP packets-per-second (PPS) and port throughputs of 155 Mbps for less than $3,000 per port.

"The needs of the IP community are driving all the bandwidth requirements in the real world, both in the LAN and in the WAN," says Brian NeSmith, Ipsilon president and CEO. "The Internet, the largest consumer of IP, is growing at astronomical rates. Ipsilon's architectural goal was to make IP faster without changing it, to design a solution that would fit cleanly into existing IP network architectures and work with existing IP applications and network management tools. We've delivered on that goal with the IP Switch ATM 1600, which boosts IP performance fivefold for a fraction of the cost of conventional devices."

"Ipsilon Networks has finally brought mission-critical ATM to the real-world network," according to Industry Analyst Fred McClimans, at Decisys, Inc., Sterling, Va. "By deploying an IP switch based on ATM hardware, a company that runs its business on IP routers today can enjoy the dramatic performance gains of ATM at very low risk, because if you know IP, you know IP switching. The Ipsilon solution is very pragmatic in its support for campus, departmental, and building backbones, as well as bandwidth-insatiable power workgroups."

Hardware Acceleration of IP Traffic

The IP Switch ATM 1600 implements the IP protocol stack on ATM hardware, which operates as a high performance hardware accelerator. Using an intelligent classification scheme, the IP Switch ATM 1600 dynamically determines when to switch and when to route based on the needs of IP conversations, or flows. It maximizes throughput of longer lasting flows -- such as file transfer protocol (FTP) data, Telnet data, hypertext transmission protocol (HTTP) data, and multimedia audio and video -- by cut-through switching in the ATM hardware. It reserves hop-by-hop store-and-forward routing for short-lived traffic, such as Domain Name Server (DNS) queries, simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) data, and SNMP queries. Because the majority of the traffic (up to 90 percent in network tests) qualifies for the hardware optimization of cut-through switching, IP routing intelligence becomes so inexpensive that it can be fully implemented in every IP Switch.

For pure IP environments, or where tunneling or encapsulation of non-IP protocols is employed, the IP Switch ATM 1600 provides a complete premises backbone solution. In the workgroup, it offers a perfect blend of high performance and infrastructure compatibility. Routing decisions are based on IP protocols, so the IP Switch ATM 1600 behaves like an IP router and is naturally interoperable with existing applications. Familiar IP management and troubleshooting tools work in expected ways.

The IP Switch ATM 1600 incorporates a World Wide Web server that can be accessed locally or remotely through a Netscape or other Web browser. Managers configure the switch through intuitive, user-friendly forms. Navigating through the Web site, they can check current state of any switch, refer to the user documentation, download new software versions, or link to Ipsilon customer service.

"Ipsilon provides the best of both worlds," says Noemi Berry, network development engineer at NASA Ames Research Facility in Mountain View, Calif. "It's a routed network that's switched when it needs to be, according to the traffic characteristics. From a host and application perspective, it looks just like an IP router. And you can configure it from a Web browser, a nice familiar interface. The whole idea is very clever."

The Proof is in the Numbers

Because the Ipsilon architecture decouples the switching intelligence from the raw hardware horsepower, the throughput of flow traffic is limited only by the underlying ATM switch engine. The IP Switch ATM 1600 supports up to 5.3 million IP PPS throughput. By contrast, the bridged approach of ATM Forum LANE implementations reaches a theoretical maximum throughput of 2.8 million PPS for a switch of equivalent size. Today's top-of-the-line routers report throughput in the 250,000 PPS range today, though some companies have announced forwarding rates of up to a million PPS. Future generations of Ipsilon IP Switches will scale in step with ATM switch engines, which are expected to become five-to-ten times faster in second-generation spins alone.

"ATM started out as a simple cell-switching technology, but with Classical IP over ATM, LANE, MPOA, and a host of other proposed standards, it has become very complicated to get ATM to=20 work in existing networks," says Tom Lyon, Ipsilon founder, CTO, and chairman. "We've figured out how to take advantage of the core technology of ATM and apply it to a widely used, widely understood networking standard -- IP. Everyone knows that IP works. It runs on the LAN, it runs in the WAN, it runs over all media, it runs on modems and ISDN, and it's the mainstay of the Internet. We get the power boost of ATM combined with the robust and proven behavior of IP."