Alcatel-Lucent Routers Meet the Terabit Barrier

Alcatel-Lucent introduced a new chipset into its networking portfolio, that can deliver one terabit of data on 10 slots. The existing 7750 Service Router has been updated with Alcatel's FP2 chipset, an in-house creation signed by the company's engineers.

According to the company, the new chipset was developed in a three-year timeframe, and will deliver impressive network bandwidths up to a terabit. Lindsay Newell, vice president of marketing at Alcatel-Lucent's Internet Protocol division, said that the company had to manage the production by itself, given the fact that the new chipset is still manufactured in small amounts.

The new chipset has been introduced into the company's already existing 7750 Service Router and the 7450 Ethernet Service Switch using a new card, called IOM3-XP. However, the full upgrade must be accompanied by new line cards, in order to increase the density of Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports.

At the moment, the company is offering 20 Gigabit Ethernet ports especially tailored to meet the requirements of fiber or copper networks, as well as two or four 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports per card. The enterprise-level FP2 chipset also offers increased performance in handling multiple services per router. The company claims that its new chip can fully support up to 10 times the number of services for a single networking device.

The two terabit networking equipments will start shipping during the second quarter of the year. However, Alcatel-Lucent has not announced pricing yet.

Alcatel-Lucent has also launched a new series of cards in order to meet the increasing demand in enterprise-level Virtual Private Networking services. The new cards are alleged to come with a significant performance boost as well as deeper packets inspection.

The new IPSec-Integrated Service Adapter can provide up to 64,000 concurrent IPSec VPN tunnels and is also pitched at the enterprise market. The card can be used as an add-on to the 7710 SR router.