Vitesse releases Jaguar switches and MACs for Carrier Ethernet network equipment
FEBRUARY 9, 2010 -- Having dropped a few hints yesterday about its new product plans, Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. (Pink Sheets: VTSS) provided more concrete information with the release today of the Jaguar family of Carrier Ethernet devices. Using a new architecture, the family of electronics devices is designed to offer an optimized feature set to help transition today’s TDM circuit-switched networks to packet-based Ethernet networks.
With the Jaguar family of devices, Ethernet services are delivered faster with greater flexibility at a lower cost, Vitesse asserts.
The Jaguar family implements what Vitesse asserts is the industry’s only architecture incorporating service features such as full IEEE-1588 functionality and OAM. Delivering advanced Ethernet timing support compatible with Synchronous Ethernet and IEEE-1588v2, the architecture achieves accurate network timing references over packet networks, which is particularly important in mobile backhaul applications. Vitesse further asserts that the architecture is the first to provide OEMs and service providers with five-9s of reliability over packet-based networks, including delivery of real-time multimedia services.
The service-aware architecture is designed to map client traffic to any of the thousands of services, with each individual service offering Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF)-compliant policing, scheduling, and traffic shaping. Vitesse says a single chip provides thousands of policers and as many as 50,000 statistics to ensure and monitor service-level agreements. This results in flexible service differentiation and support, allowing providers to easily deploy services such as E-Line, E-Tree, and E-LAN, the company adds.
The Jaguar family launches with four devices:
- two Carrier Ethernet switches -- the Jaguar (VSC7460) and LynX (VSC7462)
- two Media Access Controllers (MACs) -- the CE-MaX-24 (VSC7364) and CE-MaX-12 (VSC7366).
To deliver carrier-grade reliability, these devices are designed to offer hardware-generated continuity checking for port, link, tunnel, and service protection. The fast link failure detection and exclusive path protection mechanism provide reliable 50-ms protection switching performance, Vitesse adds.
The Jaguar switches integrate multiple ports of Gigabit Ethernet with traffic-shaping features for service-aware networks. Providing more on-chip resources for policing and statistics than any other products in their class, in Vitesse’s view, the Jaguar and LynX switches are engineered to support “all” popular connection-oriented and connectionless network protocols, including Provider Bridging, Provider Backbone Bridging (PBB), Provider Backbone Bridging with Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE), and Multi-Protocol Label Switching – Transport Profile (MPLS-TP).
The Jaguar has twenty-four 10/100/1000-Mbps Ethernet ports and four 10-Gigabit Ethernet XAUI ports. The LynX is a 12-port version with dual 10-Gbps ports and the XAUI ports can be configured as four 2.5-Gbps interfaces.
The Vitesse Carrier Ethernet MACs are pin compatible with its switch devices. The MACs are available with two port counts: 24 Gigabit Ethernet ports with four 10-Gbps ports or 12 Gigabit Ethernet ports with two 10-Gbps ports. These MACs have the service-aware and traffic engineering features of Jaguar and LynX, but are intended for delivering Ethernet services over SONET and packet optical networks.
Vitesse says it will soon announce another family of Ethernet switch products designed for carrier access applications such as mobile backhaul. These carrier access switches will share the same software API as the Jaguar family.
Vitesse will begin sampling these devices to lead customers in Q2 2010. Production pricing will range from $150 to $60 based on device selection.