Day SCREAMers

Perhaps one of the worst-kept secrets in the network-equipment business is that service providers have switched their strategic focus from building out bandwidth to delivering value-added services over that raw bandwidth.

In addition to driving down the revenue of optical-transport equipment makers, the shift has fueled the creation of a new class of service-aware switches and routers at the edge of the public network.

One of the latest players in this increasingly crowded segment of the market to introduce a new product is net.com, which announced the SCREAM100 and SCREAM50 systems earlier this week. SCREAM is actually an abbreviation of sorts for Service Creation Manager. Although net.com's new gear equals or exceeds many of the density and capacity characteristics of its competitors, the company, as the product family name suggests, if focusing its marketing campaign around the service-creation and provisioning attributes of its equipment.

"Speeds and feeds are fundamental and we have the plumbing," says Craig Forbes, vice president and general manager at net.com. "But that's not the issue here."

Engineers at net.com have instead designed a system that is optimized for flexibility and the ability to help service providers deliver and bill for advanced IP and legacy services, says Forbes. Equipped with a mixture of network processors and custom ASICs, the SCREAM systems are designed to take in flows of traffic from customer access gear, apply traffic-handling instructions and deliver it to the core of the network.

In addition to helping service providers offer value-added services, such as VPNs, firewalls and service-level agreements, the SCREAM management system, says Forbes, enables service providers to create customer-provisioning tools.

"Users must be much more involved in the way the network is provisioned," says Forbes. "It's about how the network presents itself to the user."

The key to SCREAM's flexibility, adds Forbes, is net.com's decision to create a separation between the control plane and the data-delivery plane of the equipment. This so-called SplitPlane architecture, says Forbes, simplifies the creation of service applications and eases integration into existing back-office systems by eliminating the need to link software to a specific hardware device.

"What we are promoting is similar to the softswitch movement," says Forbes, referring to the concept of extracting call control from traditional voice switches and locating it on a standard server environment.

In addition to improving the ease in which new applications can be created, the separation of hardware from software also makes it possible to make adjustments to hardware requirements without disrupting existing protocols and signaling mechanisms, says Forbes.

"If you want to change out the data platform along the way," he says, "you should be able to do that."

Separating service creation from underlying hardware is becoming a standard feature of equipment in this product category. Many players, such as Unisphere Networks, Lucent Technologies, Tenor Networks and others refer to an IP-services layer that rides on top of the physical infrastructure. In addition to allowing a graceful migration to different protocols and traffic types, the separation of data and control also makes infrastructures more accommodating to best-of-breed hardware approaches.

Startups such as WestWave promote separate data and control planes as a mechanism for converting backbone traffic from ATM to IP or, in an atypical scenario, from IP to ATM. The idea, say company officials, is to be able to substitute the switch fabric of the hardware without disrupting the signals and protocols that ride on top of the hardware.

This flexibility, along with support for MPLS, has also endowed emerging-edge equipment with the ability to allow incumbent service providers to move legacy traffic to an IP backbone. Equipped with the ability to take in a variety of traffic types in addition to IP—such as ATM, frame relay and private line—these edge boxes can either send the data off to the core of the network in its native form or convert it to IP. MPLS has recently emerged as the mechanism that enables carriers to provide IP flows with the same reliability and predictability attributes as connection-oriented protocols, such as ATM.

Net.com is currently testing their systems with carriers and plan to launch the products at the SuperComm show in early June.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in The Net Economy.