IP

Alcatel-Lucent’s converged backbone meets carrier needs

Alcatel-Lucent has announced a converged optical/IP backbone strategy that is aimed at a much more seamless coupling between core routing and core optics, the very thing that service providers have been demanding in RFPs. Further, the Alcatel-Lucent approach leverages the company’s optical incumbency and puts pressure on competitors that lack any real optical-layer product set or expertise.

We’ve seen operators working to create a more optical-based network core for at least five years now, and in the last year it’s become clear that they’ll execute on those demands in the near term.

The Alcatel-Lucent strategy is to take normal router-level lambda grooming and push it deeper, to the sub-lambda level, to support QoS-specific traffic. That’s a good option in our view. We must note that the new approach is overall more one of integration in a combination-of-product sense than in a single-product sense. We think this is a kind of statement of direction to create ever-tighter coupling in a data plane and management sense over time, which could be revolutionary.

IETF “LISP” initiative could offer users “global” addresses

The new IETF activity aimed at supporting enterprise multi-homing of their Internet connections may be taking a step in a much more valuable direction in the long run. The Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol or LISP is a means of breaking the current link between identifying a user and identifying the user’s location.

LISP effectively provides a kind of hierarchical routing where the primary encapsulation of a packet gets it to the correct network, and from that network it’s then routed to the correct user address on that network. A user, under LISP, would be known by a global “address” independent of the network address, and one that wouldn’t even change if the user changed ISPs.

We believe this could have a profound impact on the way the Internet works and could make IP a more suitable protocol for “infrastructure” services, as well as making its operation less costly. However, it’s clear that there is a lot of opposition to LISP, even in the IETF, and so it’s not at all clear how soon it might be deployed beyond experiments.

ExperiaSphere services architecture prototype released

CIMI Corporation has announced the completion of the Alpha-One prototype of ExperiaSphere and open-source Java toolkit for creating NGN Services Architectures, syndicating service components, and exposing services for partnership to the web community.

CIMI also announced its ExperiaSphere vendor partner, Extreme Networks. ExperiaSphere will support the EPICenter XML developer interface, and through that will provide the ability to integrate EPICenter-managed devices into the ExperiaSphere services framework.