Vitesse Jaguar family of switches and MACs revolutionizes Carrier Ethernet networks

MPLS & ETHERNET WORLD CONGRESS 2010, PARIS, FRANCE: Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. has introduced the Jaguar family of Ethernet devices designed specifically for service provider Carrier Ethernet applications.

Utilizing a new architecture from Vitesse, this family offers an optimized feature set that is critical for transitioning today’s TDM circuit-switched networks to modern, packet-based Ethernet networks. This transition enables carriers worldwide to provide expanded services to users of wired and wireless networks. With the Jaguar family of devices, Ethernet services are delivered faster with greater flexibility at a lower cost.

Vitesse’s years of experience in Ethernet architectures position the Company to enable the migration from SONET/SDH to packet-based networks. The Jaguar family implements the industry’s only architecture incorporating advanced service features such as full IEEE-1588 functionality and OAM (Operations, Administration, and Maintenance).

Delivering advanced Ethernet timing support compatible with Synchronous Ethernet and IEEE-1588v2, the architecture achieves accurate network timing references over packet networks, which is particularly important in mobile backhaul applications.

Additionally, the architecture is the first to provide OEMs and service providers with five-9’s of reliability over packet-based networks – including delivery of real-time multimedia services.

This service-aware architecture is designed to map client traffic to any of the thousands of services, with each individual service offering Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF)-compliant policing, scheduling, and traffic shaping.

A single chip provides thousands of policers and as many as 50,000 statistics to ensure and monitor Service Level Agreements. This results in unprecedented flexible service differentiation and support, allowing providers to easily deploy services such as E-Line, E-Tree, and E-LAN.

The Jaguar family launches with four devices – two Carrier Ethernet switches: Jaguar (VSC7460) and LynX (VSC7462) and two Media Access Controllers (MACs): CE-MaX-24 (VSC7364) and CE-MaX-12 (VSC7366). To deliver carrier-grade reliability, these devices afford hardware-generated continuity checking for Port, Link, Tunnel, and Service protection. The fast link failure detection and exclusive path protection mechanism provide reliable 50mS protection switching performance critical to carrier networks.

The Jaguar switches integrate multiple ports of Gigabit Ethernet with advanced traffic-shaping features for service-aware networks. Providing more on-chip resources for policing and statistics than any other products in their class, Vitesse’s Jaguar and LynX switches support all popular connection-oriented and connectionless network protocols, including Provider Bridging, Provider Backbone Bridging (PBB), Provider Backbone Bridging with Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE), and Multi-Protocol Label Switching – Transport Profile (MPLS-TP).

Offering a dense alternative for constrained rack space, the Jaguar has 24 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet ports and four 10 Gigabit Ethernet XAUI ports. The LynX is a 12-port version with dual 10 Gigabit ports and the XAUI ports can be configured as four 2.5 Gbps interfaces.

The Vitesse Carrier Ethernet MACs are pin compatible with its switch devices. The MACs are available with two port counts: 24 Gigabit Ethernet ports with four 10 Gigabit ports or 12 Gigabit Ethernet ports with two 10 Gigabit ports. These MACs boast all the service-aware and traffic engineering features of Jaguar and LynX, yet are intended for delivering Ethernet services over SONET and packet optical networks.