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Xelerated Demonstrates Hitless Forwarding Plane Upgrades for Carrier-Class Metro Ethernet Applications

Posted on: Friday, 3 June 2005, 12:00 CDT

Xelerated Demonstrates Hitless Forwarding Plane Upgrades for Carrier-Class Metro Ethernet Applications

Xelerated, the price/performance leader in network processing, will show the industry's first demonstration of a hitless in-service forwarding plane upgrade. While running traffic at wire speed their metro Ethernet forwarding-plane application will be upgraded to support VPLS without dropping any packets. This demonstration will take place in Xelerated's booth #60088 at the Supercomm exhibit that opens next week. The X11 Reference Design Kit featuring the first network processor optimized for mission-critical Ethernet applications will be on display at Supercomm in Chicago, June 7-9.

Carrier-class metro Ethernet systems need feature flexibility as well as availability, scalability and the cost advantage that makes Ethernet so attractive in the first place. Both ASIC-based solutions and traditional asynchronous store and forward NPUs have trouble meeting these challenges.

"Our focused, fully synchronous data-flow architecture does away with all the extra complexity that plagues general-purpose, asynchronous, store and forward NPU architectures while enabling flexibility which is non existent in ASIC-based solutions," said Gary Lidington, VP of Marketing at Xelerated. "In the Ethernet world, it is hard to justify paying extra for complexity you don't need, and simple synchronous behavior provides a number of reliability and predictability benefits that are important for mission-critical networks."

"Hitless in-service upgrades are critical to meeting the stringent availability requirements of carrier-class networks and Xelerated is the first NPU vendor to actually demonstrate that it works," said Bob Wheeler senior analyst at The Linley Group. "With this new feature and the introduction of VPLS support, Xelerated has delivered the most comprehensive feature set for carrier-class metro Ethernet applications."

Xelerated's X11 network processor is the industry's first network processor optimized for mission critical Ethernet applications such as carrier-class Metro Ethernet. The X11's unique, highly focused, synchronous data flow architecture provides the flexibility necessary to track changing standards and the different requirements of multiple geographies without adding the unnecessary complexity that increases costs and development time and reduces reliability, predictability and performance. The X11 is designed with redundant code storage, which ensures code integrity and allows hitless in-service upgrades. Its hot-swap interfaces ensure high availability, while extensive QoS and OA&M features increase manageability.

The X11 20G full-duplex network processor, targeted at Ethernet applications, is sampling to customers in July and priced at $395 in volumes of 10K. The hitless in-service upgrade feature is supported in both the X10q family of NPUs as well as the X11.

The hitless metro Ethernet forwarding plane upgrade demonstration will be shown in Xelerated's booth #60088 at the Supercomm trade show in Chicago, June 7-9.

ABOUT XELERATED

Xelerated, the price/performance leader in network processing, is recognized as being the only network processor vendor to have combined the efficiency of an ASIC with the programmability of traditional network processors. This extraordinary efficiency translates into the most cost effective solution with the highest performance and lowest power consumption on the market. Xelerated's award-winning products target network equipment for the enterprise and metro Ethernet markets. Xelerated has offices in Santa Clara, California, USA, and Stockholm, Sweden. Additional information is available at http://www.xelerated.com

Source: Business Wire

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