Extreme Networks' latest product is the result of over three years of secret research. The company aims to enable a revolution in the delivery of converged services.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [January 9, 2004]

Founded in December of 1996 and based in Santa Clara, Calif., Extreme Networks was an innovator at the start, receiving its first Best of Show award at Networld + Interop (N+I) in May of 1997.

When the company called to say that their latest product was the result of over three years of careful, secret research, we paid close attention. The new product, the Black Diamond 10K line of Ethernet switches, comes with a totally new operating system, the ExtremeWare XOS.

The XOS is based on a version of Unix called POSIX which is maintained by the IEEE. The modular OS is designed to allow individual software components to be restarted without restarting the whole switch.

Innovative ASIC architecture protects buyers' investments by allowing the ASIC itself to be reprogrammed as standards develop. The company calls its ASICs T-Flex "Programmable ASICs" although it appears to be the OS rather than the ASICs that are agile.

The ASICs perform basic functions and the OS accepts patches and upgrades, allowing it to change the operation of the ASIC to adapt to new protocols. Programmable OS elements include a packet parser, a packet editor, a packet encapsulation engine, and a statistics tool.

The company claims this pioneering development has produced over 70 patents.

The first of the 10K line, the 10808, delivers 48 ports of 10 GigE or 480 ports of GigE. It can handle 128,000 ingress and egress ACLs, 1,200,000 IPv4 and IPv6 routes, and 256,000 MAC addresses. It is already compatible with a wide variety of management, QoS, and security protocols, and more can be added due to the modular structure of the OS.

The company claims a record-setting "total switching capacity" of 1.6 Tbps. Although this particular statistic can be manipulated, the massive capacity is nevertheless impressive.

For the core of the Internet, a key feature is being able to upgrade the unit without shutting it down, which calls "hitless failover." Timon Sloane, Extreme Networks director of product management, says, "if any module fails, the system continues to operate without losing a single packet and failover takes less than 50 milliseconds."

This, in turn, allows companies to upgrade more frequently. Sloan says that a telco using a competitor's product has been upgrading only every six months. "It's tough to be competitive if you're doing that," he notes.

To make it easier to integrate the switch into a telco OSS environment, the company has embraced XML. "Juniper has also embraced XML in the core," notes Sloane. "Many customers now jointly deploy Extreme and Juniper."

XML is useful because, unlike the CLI, it doesn't change, so scripts written in XML are stable while those written in CLI have to be changed regularly. "Also," says Sloane, "spaces and carriage returns don't matter in XML. It's much easier for a machine to parse XML and respond to it."

Sloane says that in 2000, the company realized that a truly converged network would require a vastly more efficient switch architecture. CPU speeds are not increasing fast enough to keep pace with bandwidth demands. The transition from GigE to the 10 GigE will tax most hardware. "You cannot use a flow-based architecture where each packet gets looked up in the routing table," says Sloane. Processes will have to be flexible and adaptable.

"We think we are unique in having identified and addressed the new requirements in the core of the network," boasts Sloane. "Our vision—and one that's shared with customers and analysts—is one converged network running IP storage, Web, and voice. It uses Ethernet technology, IP technology. But it is not yet running on one infrastructure. True convergence is where all of these applications share data and intermix. Build that and you've built a world class service provider."

As technology evolves and the applications begin to interconnect, the requirements of the future are difficult to forecast. Rather than make a single prediction, Extreme is attempting to build a device that can learn and can be improved as network protocols adapt to new requirements. If it has succeeded, this will be a very impressive achievement.

Think of it as the difference between the factory worker and the knowledge worker. The factory worker is good at one specialized job, but when technology changes, the job is eliminated, and the worker is unemployed. In theory, the knowledge worker can learn and adapt to change, never becoming obsolete.

Pricing and availability
The BlackDiamond 10808, the first of the Extreme Networks BlackDiamond 10K line, is available now. Pricing starts at $90,000 for the chassis, plus $7,165 per 10 GigE port and $666 per GigE port.

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