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Networks & Infrastructure
Avici Aims to Simplify IP
Vendor’s RAPID Strategy Stresses Speed
by Jim Barthold
IP, at least from Avici Systems’ perspective, should be the simple – at least it should appear that way to the end user. To follow through on that belief, the routing solutions company unveiled at the SUPERCOMM 2005 conference today what it calls it Simple Secure Networks strategy built around its Reliable Alternate Paths for Internet Destinations (RAPID) technology.
The whole purpose is to make sure that there are no glitches in the network that cause those uncomfortable pauses in phone conversations, or, worse yet, those resets for online games. “RAPID solves the slow convergence times that exist today,” said Esmeralda Swartz, Avici’s marketing vice president. ”RAPID provides fast failover in under 50 milliseconds and doesn’t require the manual provisioning of paths that you would need to go through if you were using another protection scheme such as MPLS fast-reroute.”
RAPID follows the premise that networks will be carrying more than voice and will need different mechanisms to secure and facilitate that traffic. The technology resides in an Avici router that computes the alternate path or paths for traffic flow and, when computing the shortest route through the network, also maintains the second best route. If the primary path fails, a switch to the secondary path is nearly instantaneous.
“It deeps everything alive and does its thing in less than 50 milliseconds, which is SONET convergence time. It’s a very simple concept,” said Avici CEO Bill Leighton.
It’s more than redundancy.
“We did redundancy with our non-stop routing where we have two redundant route controls with full state between them so that if one fails the other takes over. This (RAPID) deals with what happens when a link goes out of service,” he said.
Carrier grade IP voice is, of course, the primary reason for the development of RAPID, Swartz said.
“If there’s a service disruption such as a fiber cut, you still need the routing protocols to recover in under a second,” she said. “You can’t resend it like a best-effort application.”
More interesting, and potentially more painful, is online gaming where any delay or stutter in the network could be a fatal disruption.
“People who had spent the last two hours fighting to level 27 and just got the magic silver sword get sent back to zero level,” said Leighton.
That can’t happen.
“As more things move into IP networks those requirements around reliability are going to get more stringent … getting to the point where you can do these sub-second restorations as well as never go down in the first place is becoming more critical,” he said.
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