Riverstone Networks Announces MPLS For Metropolitan Area Networks

Business Wire, Sept 18, 2000

Business/Technology Editors

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 18, 2000

Riverstone Drives MPLS Grooming and Control into Metropolitan Area

Networks to Enhance Service Creation and Control for Metro Service

Providers

Riverstone Networks, a leader in service delivery infrastructure for metropolitan service providers, today announced a comprehensive, standards-based Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) implementation for metropolitan area network applications. By providing fine-grained grooming, path optimization, and traffic segregation, MPLS makes it easier for metropolitan service providers to create, manage, and control a wide range of voice, data, and video services.

MPLS is implemented in all Riverstone RS series switch routers, which offer the industry's broadest support for optical Ethernet and legacy TDM interfaces. Metro providers can now create secure and fully manageable voice and data pathways that extend from the end user through to the optical core.

"Riverstone's mission is to continually enhance metro service providers' ability to control and account precisely for bandwidth as a means of offering value-added services," said Romulus Pereira, President and CEO of Riverstone Networks. "As the first company to introduce metro-optimized MPLS, we are enhancing our leadership by offering metro service providers the best platform for creating and delivering revenue-generating services."

"Service providers in metropolitan area networks are increasingly seeking to leverage MPLS traffic grooming capabilities for the control they need to offer differentiated services," said Raymond Keneipp, director and principal analyst at The Burton Group. "Riverstone's approach enables service providers to extend these services from the customer premise all the way through the core of the Internet, giving them end-to-end service control that has not previously been possible."

"With the vision of metropolitan area bandwidth becoming a commodity, service providers must rely on value-added services to deliver revenue," said Kevin Mitchell, an analyst at Infonetics Research, Inc. "With the addition of MPLS to the metro access platform, Riverstone is able to offer precision control and traffic engineering capabilities that enable a wide range of value-added services, including tiered services, MPLS-based Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), and MPLS-based transparent LAN services."

Extending MPLS Across the Metro

Riverstone's metro-optimized MPLS allows service providers to create and manage traditional services as well as New Business Internet services such as virtual campuses between metros, VPN services, Voice over IP (VoIP), virtual leased lines, and virtual routed private networks. MPLS enables precision bandwidth control at the service or customer level over ATM, IP, or Frame Relay networks.

MPLS Means QoS

Riverstone's MPLS implementation allows providers to offer end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) and Class of Service (CoS). Providers can run voice, data, and video services over a single protocol infrastructure. MPLS allows deployment of performance sensitive applications with stringent latency and jitter requirements. Riverstone products support these requirements across a wide variety of interfaces--SONET, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), and Wave Division Multiplexing (WDM) as well as T1/E1, T3/E3, Gigabit Ethernet and 10/100 Ethernet.

Using the MPLS protocol, service providers can establish and maintain QoS across an entire metropolitan area network, regardless of the services they provide or the transport media they use. By creating individual Label Switched Paths (LSPs), providers can set bandwidth, preferred paths, or priority constraints at the user or application level to easily support rapidly growing deployments by Application Service Providers (ASPs), Building Local Exchange Carriers (BLECs), and other metro providers. Similarly, providers can create LSPs for performance-sensitive applications such as voice and video, and then ensure that these LSPs meet the low-latency and jitter requirements of such time-sensitive information.

Advanced Provisioning

Riverstone's MPLS implementation incorporates a full set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that enable service providers to seamlessly integrate LSP traffic engineering with subscriber management and provisioning systems. Riverstone's unique open APIs allow service providers to customize and incorporate its MPLS solution quickly into their networks to deliver advanced traffic engineering, QoS, and security features in their metro area networks without jeopardizing service delivery.

Hardware-based MPLS

Riverstone's MPLS implementation is hardware based and operates at wire speed while retaining the flexibility of software upgrades. In addition to the standard MPLS implementation--which includes RSVP-TE, LDP/CR-LDP and BGP extensions for label distribution and signaling--Riverstone's MPLS implementation supports OSPF and IS-IS-TE traffic engineering extensions. Riverstone's metro-optimized MPLS implementation also offers fast fail-over support with redundant LSPs, along with per-LSP rate limiting to ensure reliable service delivery.