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Critical Requirements of Carrier Ethernet vs. Enterprise EthernetWebinar Series

September 2008

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Carrier Ethernet Silicon Battleground

VolumeASSP

Enterprise Ethernet Silicon Market

Mai

nst

ream

VolumeASSP

Carrier Ethernet Silicon Market

Very Different Features

Network ScalabilityOAM & QoS

StatisticsCircuits

Carrier Standards

PriceMass MarketSimplicityPort DensityBasic Standards

Hardware Driven Service Driven

Ear

ly

FE

AT

UR

ES

Very Different Business Models

uP/FPGA’s NPU’sReplaced in Volume Markets

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Lets dive into the differences …

Feature/FunctionEnterprise Ethernet

Silicon(Typical)

Carrier Ethernet Silicon

Network Scalability 16K MAC Addresses4K VLANs (per switch)

128K MAC Addresses>80K VLANS (per switch)>1 Million Service Instances16K Pseudowires

OAM Support None (or in software which is slow …)

802.1ag (CFM) >1000 services @ 3.3ms802.3ah (EFM)ITU Y.1731 (MPLS)

QoS Minimal CIR & EIR ProfilesPacket “Re-coloring”

Protection & Statistics <25K counters typicalFailover in seconds

250K counters/statistics<50ms failover rate

Carrier Standards Compliance

PB (802.1ad) (Q-in-Q) PBB (802.1ah) (Mac-in-Mac)PBB-TE (802.Qay)VPLS (RFC4762)

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Debates Shaping the Market

Carrier Ethernet Switching Challenges

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OAM Complexity High for CE Switches Major challenge is scaling for two

critical functions CCM message generation/reception is

processing intensive Performance monitoring <intensive

but accuracy for loss measurement is critical

Many systems today struggle to meet 3.3ms CCM frequency for >~100 services

Accurate performance monitoring requires large # of statistics counters

Hardware assist is mandatory for >1000 CCM’s @ 3.3ms rate Accurate PM

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Why QoS & Buffering Matter

Function of TM is to classify, police, and avoid congestion for SLA enforcement

Many CE switches in market today are oversubscribed and have very limited TM

Proper TM & packet buffering is critical to handle various traffic types to ensure QoS <100us of congestion will cause

some switches to drop packets .. Proper traffic management ensures

high priority (voice) is dropped last True carrier class switches should

allow for 1000x more congestion than enterprise

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Lightstorm Architecture

• Purpose built for Carrier Market

• Developed closely with leading carriers, TEM architects, and standards leadership

• Scalable hardware and software roadmap over several generations

• No complex NPU programming

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More information …

Visit – www.lightstormnetworks.com