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An
edge router with the reliability, performance,
and flexibility to deliver carrier-class IP services
The unprecedented acceptance
of the Internet as an essential business tool
has created new opportunities for service providers,
as well as new challenges. Among the challenges
is the urgency of improving service availability
as business customers become increasingly intolerant
of unreliable IP services and demand SLAs. In
addition, the steep upward trajectory in IP service
demand has introduced new requirements for scaling
the network. This involves not only increasing
network capacity and packet-forwarding rates,
but also ensuring that the operating software
that supports routing protocols and packet forwarding
processes is also scalable, robust, and highly
resilient. Finally, margin and competitive pressures
are motivating interest in IP services beyond
basic Internet access but uncertainty about what
new IP services will predominate over the long
term, or even what protocols or data encapsulations
will be required to implement them, complicates
decision making about suitable platforms.
The SmartEdge? 800, a member of the SmartEdge
family of carriergrade networking platforms, is
targeted at IP dedicated access services, Layer
3 and Layer 2 VPNs, premium service delivery,
as well as backbone core applications. The product
is distinguished by a number of features for providers
focused on delivering highly available IP services
today, and having total flexibility to support
new IP services in the future.
System
Architecture
The SmartEdge 800 is engineered
for deployment in the most demanding network environments.
All common equipment and line cards are hot swappable
and critical components such as the Route Processor
can be implemented in redundant configurations.
Innovative software enables fast failover to a
hot standby Route Processor with no interruption
to forwarding, and near hitless software upgrades.
The packet switching mesh employs high-performance
ASICs developed by Redback and is distributed
to every line card, thus having no single point
of failure. There is a dedicated processor for
time critical I/O functions such as fault and
performance monitoring and alarms. Power and return
lines are diversely routed across the backplane
to every slot in the chassis. The SmartEdge 800
packs considerable performance into an extremely
compact form factor. The 15.75" chassis (9
Rack Units, 4 chassis per rack) has a packet mesh
that operates at 160 Gbps with sustained packet
forwarding rates of 65 Mpps. There are 14 slots
in the chassis, two for route processors and 12
for line cards. High port densities allow providers
to maximize the use of rack space and conserve
power 〞 both of which are significant contributors
to operational expense.
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| Interface Type |
Ports per Slot |
Ports per Chassis |
| DS1 (optical) |
336 |
4,032 |
| E1 (optical) |
189 |
2,268 |
| E1 (copper) |
24 |
288 |
| DS-3 (optical) |
12 |
144 |
| DS-3 (copper) |
12 |
144 |
| OC-3 |
8 |
96 |
| OC-12 |
4 |
48 |
| OC-48 |
1 |
12 |
| DS-3 ATM |
12 |
144 |
| OC-3 ATM |
4 |
48 |
| OC-12 ATM |
1 |
12 |
| Fast Ethernet |
12 |
144 |
| Gigabit Ethernet |
4 |
48 |
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Purpose
built hardware and software. Redback has
invested heavily in building highly resilient
hardware and software for the SmartEdge 800. The
product was designed with availability, scalability,
programmability, and high performance in mind.
It supports 99.999% reliability, scales both physically
and logically to thousands of sessions, is flexible
enough to be continuously upgraded to support
new services, and can forward packets at line
rate even with features enabled.
High-performance switching
and programmable forwarding. The SmartEdge
800 employs a very highperformance packet mesh,
whereby every card is interconnected to every
other card. The packet mesh has 160 Gbps of switching
capacity and is built with ASICs developed by
Redback. All of the packet forwarding functions
in the SmartEdge Router are implemented with Redback＊s
specialized network processors, called Packet
Processing ASICs (PPA).
The SmartEdge 800 uses a dedicated
PPA on every line card for input packet processing
and another dedicated PPA on every line card for
outgoing packet processing. With dedicated packet
processors for incoming and outgoing traffic,
the SmartEdge 800 can support high-performance
forwarding, with a rich set of packet processing
features (ACLs, rate limiting, etc) turned on,
both on the access side (toward the customer)
and the backbone side. The PPA is fully programmable
so enabling new services is as straightforward
as reprogramming the hardware. The PPA preserves
investments in hardware going forward since new
features can be enabled with new software rather
than new hardware.
Advanced features that maximize
Route Processor availability. The SmartEdge
800 hardware and software support a hot standby
Route Processor with fast failover and minimal
interruption to forwarding. An Active Component
Upgrade feature allows individual routing protocols
and other feature modules to be upgraded in crisis
situations, with no interruption to forwarding.
Distributed forwarding.
Forwarding functions on the SmartEdge 800 are
distributed on every line card and handled by
the PPA. A failure of one line card has no impact
whatsoever on packet forwarding for any other
line card. In contrast to most existing platforms,
the forwarding path of the SmartEdge 800 is fully
programmable, so it can forward any packet type,
with any encapsulation, without intervention by
the Route Processor. Thus, there is no central
point of failure for packet forwarding, even for
specialized packet types.
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Non-stop
forwarding and separation of routing and forwarding.
The SmartEdge 800 can support non-stop forwarding
by continuing to forward packets even when the
control plane is adversely affected by network
instability or a protocol crash or restart. This
is because routing and forwarding functions are
strictly separated. The Route
Processor is dedicated exclusively to processing
route
updates and calculating routes. Business customer
traffic and
SLAs are not affected by control plane transitions;
instead,
the network remains available.
Routing protocols designed
for availability, scalability, and flexibility.
Recognizing that all of the routing protocol suites
available in the open market lack high availability
and high scalability characteristics, the SmartEdge
OS was built from the ground up. The code is optimized
for high availability and engineered for scalability
to support next-generation requirements for peering
and edge aggregation. It is also designed to accommodate
new protocols such as MPLS and IPv6 with new encapsulations
and Address Families.
Software modularity and
process restartability. The SmartEdge 800
OS is highly modular to improve system reliability.
Every protocol such as BGP, OSPF, IS-IS, and RIP
is implemented as a separate process. The Routing
Information Base (RIB) and configuration UI are
also separate processes. Failure of one process
has no impact on any other process. For example,
if a network event crashes BGP it does not affect
any other protocols and does not cause a system
crash. If a routing protocol fails it can be restarted
without affecting any other protocol.
Graceful restart. The
SmartEdge 800 supports graceful restart for BGP,
OSPF, LDP and IS-IS. Graceful restart is a mechanism
which promotes high availability in the network
and minimizes the impact of restarting routing
protocols. Normally, when a protocol is restarted,
a router's peers detect that a session went down
and cause reconvergence throughout the network.
The resulting route recomputation and networkwide
routing updates consume processing resources and
potentially cause packet loss in transient forwarding
loops. When graceful restart is supported, a router's
peers do not immediately cause networkwide reconvergence.
The restarting router is given the opportunity
to re-establish routing sessions and download
fresh routes. Graceful restart works in tandem
with the forwarding plane stability introduced
by non-stop forwarding to support a new measure
of control plane stability.
Virtual private network
support. Virtual private networks (VPNs)
allow carriers to offer new services which leverage
existing infrastructure investments. The SmartEdge
800 supports both Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPNs in
conjunction with multiple contexts to create a
flexible and powerful service offering. Each VPN
gets its own IP address space, routing table,
protected network traffic, user authentication,
and other attributes. VPNs can be built across
a carrier network with a variety of different
technologies, including BGP/MPLS (RFC 2547bis),
Layer 2 MPLS (draft-martini), and GRE tunneling.
The customer can be terminated into the VPN with
a variety of different methods, including ATM,
frame relay, Ethernet, and leased line. Because
of the SmartEdge 800's support of virtual interfaces,
customers can be easily switched between different
types of VPNs with only one configuration line
change.
Routing protocol interoperability
and scaling. Delivering IP services requires
a complete set of scalable interior and Exterior
Gateway routing protocols equipped with the latest
feature extensions. The SmartEdge 800 supports
BGP, IS-IS, OSPF, and RIP. BGP features include
Route Aggregation, MD5 Authentication, Route Reflection,
Route Flap Dampening, Confederations, Communities,
Peer Groups and new extensions such as BGP Refresh,
Outbound Route Filtering, and BGP Graceful Restart.
IS-IS features include: multiple levels, multiple
instances (with redistribution between instances),
load balancing and authentication. For any combination
of route table size and peers, the routing protocols
will offer unmatched convergence times.
Support for multiple contexts.
A unique service enabling capability of the SmartEdge
800 is support for multiple routing contexts,
which allow a provider to partition a chassis
with software to create ※contexts§ or virtual
routers. Each context appears to the service provider
(and end customer) as a full-featured router with
a console along with all of the monitoring and
configuration features they would expect to see
in a dedicated router. The use of contexts in
combination with MPLS or GRE VPNs provides a powerful
VPN model that allows for increased customer visibility
into VPNs.
Quality of Service features.
The SmartEdge 800 has a full complement of packet
processing features that can be used to enable
IP services. These include extensive packet classification
or filtering capabilities based on ingress port/circuit,
source/destination IP address and/or TCP port
or protocol. Packets can be marked per the Diffserv
specification or the Type of Service bits can
be set. Access Control Lists are supported to
permit or deny packets based on the same filter
criteria.
Quality of Service functions
include ingress policing and egress shaping, whereby
incoming and outgoing traffic are conditioned
to meet a mutually agreed upon traffic profile,
typically a sustained bandwidth value plus a burst
tolerance. The SmartEdge 800 also supports sophisticated
queuing and scheduling. There are up to 1k queues
available per line card and the number and use
of the queues is configurable. Priority queueing
or Enhanced Deficit Round Robin (EDRR) are used
in conjunction with policing and shaping to manage
bandwidth. For congestion control, the SmartEdge
800 uses Random Early Detect (RED) and Weighted
Random Early Detect (WRED), the two most commonly
employed techniques available today.
Leading multicast implementation.
The SmartEdge 800 also supports a complete
suite of multicast routing protocols: IGMP, MSDP,
PIM-SM, SSM. These protocols together with the
hardware assisted multicast forwarding make for
a superior multicast implementation, supporting
very high fanouts. To protect link bandwidth and
preserve the quality of multicast streams, network
providers can also limit the number of members
in a multicast group on a per-port basis.
Bulkstats. Bulkstats
provides a more efficient alternative to SNMP
as a means of gathering network accounting statistics
from the SmartEdge 800. The router samples and
stores system, network and traffic statistics
at specified sampling intervals. The data are
then sent at specified intervals as a text file
via FTP to a networkmanagement station, allowing
for easier network management.
Traffic mirroring. Traffic
mirroring is a powerful tool for troubleshooting,
and lawful interception, and traffic analysis.
Packets can be mirrored or sampled from any circuit
in the system, at ingress or egress, and then
sent to any other circuit on the system. Up to
seven or eight classes of packets can be specified,
with each class being mirrored to a different
output circuit.
Cross connect support.
The cross connect features on the SmartEdge 800
allow network providers to offer premium services
to end customers while minimizing both equipment
expenditures and customer downtime. The SmartEdge
can locate specific packets within an end customer
traffic flow and direct them toward separate networks.
So all PPP Over Ethernet packets
can be sent to one network for standard Internet
service, and all IPv4 and IPv6 packets can be
directed toward a premium services network. Additionally,
disparate media such as ATM and Ethernet can be
cross connected together so ATM PVCs could be
aggregated into Gigabit Ethernet trunks.
PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS
Hardware
Chassis
每 15.75§(H) x 17.5§ (W) x 16§ (D), four chassis
per 7＊ rack.
每 19§ and 23§ rack mountable (front)
每 14 slots, 2 for Route Processors; 12 universal
slots for line cards,
Weight: 50 lbs unloaded; fully loaded chassis
approx. 90 lbs
每 Connectors on chassis: Power A, B; dual BITS
synchronization inputs and outputs; alarm output,
status input.
Route Processor Module
每 2 per chassis (1 working + 1 hot standby) Power
PC 750
每 768 MB memory per Route Processor
每 PC card slot for 1 GB Microdrive for secondary
storage
每 BITS clock sources (2) for external stratum
clock inputs
每 Stratum 3 Oscillator
每 Management ports: 2 craft ports: DB-9 RS-232,
Rear async modem port, Ethernet 10/100TX
Line Cards
每 Dual Packet Processing ASICs (PPA); 1 for ingress
processing, 1 for egress processing
- Packet mesh ASICs
- Forwarding performance of 160 Gbps or 65 Mpps
Card Types
- 1 port Channelized OC-12 to DS3
- 1 port Channelized OC-12 to DS1/DS3 (336 channels)
- 12 port Channelized DS3 (336 channels)
- 12 port Clear Channel DS3
- 3 port Channelized STM-1 (336 channels)
- 24 port Channelized E1 (336 channels)
- 1 port OC-48c/STM-16
- 4 port OC-12c/STM-4
- 8 port OC-3c/STM-1
- 1 port OC-12c/STM-4 ATM
- 4 port OC-3c/STM-1 ATM
- 12 port DS3 ATM
- 12 port 10/100TX Ethernet
- 4 port Gigabit Ethernet
Redundancy
每 1+1 for all common CPUs, Clock and independent
power to each line card
每 Hot standby Route Processors
每 Restartable routing processes
Operating Environment
每 Temperature: 0-40 degrees
每 Humidity: 5-90% RH
每 Power: -48 V DC
Compliance
- NEBS Level III in process, CE Mark, UL 1950,
GR-63 Core, GR-1089 Core, ETS 300 386-2 FCC Part
15, EN55022 class A, ETS 300 386-2
Software Features
- Restartable routing processes
- Non-stop forwarding
- Hot standby Route Processors
- Active Component Upgrade
- Multiple Contexts
- Premium Service Insertion
- VPN support for BGP/MPLS VPNs, Layer 2 VPNs,
GRE
- MPLS Traffic Engineering
- Access Control Lists
- Bulkstats
- Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP)
- Quality of Service: Packet classification; DiffServ
AF1-4 & EF packet marking by ACL, ingress
policing, or BGP attribute-based QoS; class-based
ingress policing and egress shaping; priority
queueing and EDRR; RED and WRED; MPLS E-LSPs
- Security: Reverse Path Forwarding (RPF) check,
SSH, MD5 support for routing protocols, key rollover,
RADIUS, TACACS+; Administrative ACLs
Encapsulations
每 PPP/HDLC, cHDLC, Ethernet, IEEE 802.1q, RFC
1483 bridged and routed IP over ATM, RFC 1490
routed IP over Frame Relay, MPLS
Protocols
每 BGP-4 (RFC 1771), IS-IS (RFC 1195 & ISO/IEC
10589), OSPF v2 (RFC 2328), RIP v2 (RFC 2453)
每 PIM-SM (RFC 2362), IGMP v1, v2, v3 (RFC 3376),
SSM (IETF Draft), MBGP (IETF Draft), MSDP (IETF
Draft)
每 MPLS-TE, RSVP (RFC 3209), LDP (RFC 3036), VRRP
(RFC 2338)
每 BGP/MPLS VPNs (RFC 2547), Layer 2 VPNs (IETF
draft)
Configuration and Network Management
每 Industry familiar Command Line Interface (CLI)
support via telnet or Secure Shell (SSH)
- Multiple user groups or access levels with definable
access privileges
- User authentication via RADIUS, TACACS+, local
file
- Transaction based configuration against a configuration
database including commits, aborts and ability
to roll back unintended changes
- NetOp EMS support for event logs, SNMP traps,
interface statistics for troubleshooting and performance
monitoring, port views and chassis views
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