TiMetra router: a focus on services - 2003 Product of the Month

Telecommunications Americas, June, 2003

www.timetra.com

A router is a router, right? The answer in this instance is not if the vendor is TiMetra Networks, which is expected to unveil its SR series of devices at SUPERCOMM 2003. The SR in the case of the Mountain View, Calif., start-up stands for service router. And by this TiMetra means not simply a box built for Internet access, but a router that enables the delivery of data services in a scalable, manageable and profitable way.

For openers, TiMetra's MPLS router supports more than a million routes, a thousand-plus BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) peers, and the ability to reroute traffic onto back-up LSPs (label switched paths) in less than 50 his. it supports Layer 2 VPNs by flexibly tunneling services such as frame relay, ATM and Ethernet via MPLS and/or GRE (generic routing encapsulation), with support of L2TPv3 tunneling to come later.

Because TiMetra has co-authored an IETF draft for VPLS (virtual private LAN service), the TiMetra router can connect multiple sites as if they were on a single LAN--in contrast to the popular Martini draft which supports point-to-point Ethernet connections. And, of course, the router supports BGP MPLS VPNs as specified by RFC 2547.

The router's scalability and support of multipoint Ethernet connectivity enabled via VPLS were among the reasons for Masergy Communications' selection of the TiMetra router. Masergy, a Dallas-based service provider that offer four classes of service over its IP/MPLS network to handle voice, data and video traffic, has been running a VPLS trial between London, New York and Washington, D.C. for a large financial services company for the past four months. "The TiMetra platform has been remarkably stable and easy to configure. We have had no service outages during the four-month trial," said Kenneth Frank, senior vice president of engineering and systems at Masergy.

Prime pieces of TiMetra's intellectual property are two chips (a network processor chip and a traffic management chip) that constitute the router's programmable 20-Gbps forwarding engine called FlexPath. Every function of FlexPath is enabled via microcode, and so new features or services can be supported by writing and downloading new microcode without having to swap existing line cards for new ones.

TiMetra bills itself as a service router vendor but the notion of "service" isn't limited to the device's support for Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPNs and for Internet access. In fact, the router provides a number of other "services" such as billing, QoS, diagnostics and management. For example, the TiMetra router allows network operators to provision services--just as they would with frame relay or ATM--with SLAs even though hundreds of services might be supported on any physical port. In fact, this ability to support per-service QoS was another reason for Masergy picking the TiMetra router. Network operators can also bill for each service on a usage or flat-rate basis and they can remotely run diagnostics, such as verifying all aspects of a service from end-to-end or mirroring a service by inserting OAM packets to find out what the problem is. It's these QoS, OAM&P and billing capabilities that TiMetra hopes will set it apart from other router vendors.

Three devices make up TiMetra's router line-up. At the low end is the single-slot, 20-Gbps full-duplex SR-1, TiMetra compares the 1.5-RU high SR-1 with the Cisco OSR 7600 and the Juniper M40, each of which takes up one-half of a rack. TiMetra's mid-range system is the four-slot SR-4, which provides 60-Gbps full-duplex capacity and stands 10.5 inches high. TiMetra's high-end system is the 12-slot SR-12, which takes up a third, of a rack to provide 200-Gbps full-duplex capacity. Two of the SR-12's slots are for the switch fabric and the route controller.

In all three models, each 20-Gbps full-duplex slot houses the IOM (input/output module) that contains the network processor and traffic management chips. Into each IOM can be plugged two 10-Gbps MDAs (media dependent adapters). Any media (e.g., Ethernet or SONET can be supported in any slot while the same MDA can support short- or long-range optics.

According to TiMetra, no switch fabric or backplane upgrade would be necessary; only the TOM would heed to be replaced for either the SR-4 or the SR-12 to support 40-Gbps full duplex I/O.

Aside from Masergy, TiMetra says its router is deployed in a data center application. TiMetra claims it has more than a dozen trials underway globally with IXCs, PTTs, CLECs and ISPs.