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Industry Support “BT is excited to see the vendor community develop PBB-TE technologies. BT has a vested interest in the advancement of MPLS and PBB-TE and the use of these two technologies in our 21st Century network.” Peter Willis
“Today’s announcement of a Carrier Ethernet Multicast Framework, along with Hammerhead’s collaboration with Soapstone Networks’ control plane provisioning software, is important to service providers with large installed MPLS and VPLS networks who want to leverage the benefits of adding PBB-TE to their metro networks. The Carrier Ethernet Multicast Framework addresses the perceived limitations for PBB-TE based networks: the lack of E-LAN and multicast capabilities and the absence of control plane provisioning. Hammerhead is building upon its PBB-TE Service Gateway to provide architecturally innovative solutions for service providers to expedite and simplify their network deployments as the only demonstrated solution for interoperability between MPLS and PBB-TE networks." Ray Mota 
"Hammerhead has shattered the perceived limitations for multipoint and multicast over PBB-TE and more importantly is the only company enabling carriers to utilize their existing MPLS infrastructure to enable an end-to-end Carrier Ethernet service across PBB-TE and MPLS networks. Full featured Carrier Ethernets are rarely deployed in the metro area today due to high cost. Hammerhead is breaking down that cost barrier." Michael Kennedy "Hammerhead's Carrier Ethernet Multicast Framework is an innovation that will serve several purposes for carriers wanting to use more Ethernet in their access networks, with the addition of E-Tree configurations for point-to-multipoint and multicast applications. With Hammerhead service providers can now interleave and interoperate new PBT/PBB-TE sections of their networks with existing MPLS/VPLS infrastructure to achieve end-to-end Carrier Ethernet services, including business multicast and IPTV triple play." Michael Howard "Hammerhead’s HSX 6000 PBB-TE Service Gateway extends the capabilities of current point to point PBB-TE based metro networks and for the first time enables support of applications such as IPTV and business and financial multicast services over PBB-TE trunks. These applications are driving the bandwidth requirements in next generation networks and are key to widespread PBB-TE deployments. Hammerhead is the first to address all three missing components with its service gateway which should entice service providers to leverage PBB-TE in their metro networks: the ability to support sophisticated services (E-LAN, Multicast), the ability to support seamless interoperability between existing MPLS-based metro networks and the ability to provision and manage these new service capabilities by interoperating with Soapstone’s Provider Network Controller (PNC)." Glen Hunt “The thing we call an NGN is “new” not because of the protocols it uses but because of the way it’s built. The old network paradigm was to connect infrastructure from which you derived, and then sold, services. The new way, the NGN way, is to design your network to be service infrastructure, a fabric on which any service can be overlaid, and through which any can be operationalized. IP and MPLS were conceptualized before this shift in the planning paradigm, and as the demands of service infrastructure became clear, the IP world split off into an IP/MPLS piece for those services that were very specifically IP-centric, and a T-MPLS piece to serve the special needs of service infrastructure. Carrier Ethernet was similarly conceptualized before this shift. In the past, it was either the “SONET-replacement” technology or the “Enterprise Ethernet Services technology”. When PBT (PBB-TE) came along, it was first seen as a point-to-point alternative to SONET, but what it really needed to be was service infrastructure. To be suitable for service infrastructure missions, you have to have three things. First, very precise traffic engineering and SLA management capability, which PBT has. Second, support for the three connection topologies that are recognized as being the basis for ALL services—what the MEF calls “E-Line”, “E-LAN”, and “E-Tree”. Third, an incredibly flexible and agile control plane that can structure services in seconds at low operational cost, and manage failure modes at SONET-failover speeds. These are the things that Hammerhead is bringing to the PBT world in their announcement. They’ve added support for all of the connection topology models, so PBT can support not only “pseudowire” or “virtual leased line” services but also multipoint VPN-like services and multicast IPTV-like services. They’ve partnered with Soapstone, a leading vendor in flexible universal control plane technology to provide for fast routing and rerouting and linkage with key standards like IPsphere and TMF eTOM. Hammerhead has also provided the critical capability of interworking PBT with MPLS to allow PBT services to be linked to IP-based services where one technology is used in a metro area and the other for the wide-area connections, or to support inter-provider service connections. In the last year, CIMI Corporation has seen PBT move from something interesting to three of the ten global tier-one operators we survey, to something actively considered by ten out of ten. There has never been a technology that has moved so far so fast, in all of the years we have surveyed network operators globally. This interest isn’t prompted by their desire for SONET/SDH replacement, it’s prompted by their interest in PBT and carrier Ethernet as the foundation for service infrastructure and Hammerhead has taken a giant step to providing the channel for that interest to be fulfilled. PBT has been promoted as a step along the path toward carrier Ethernet revenue. With the support of all of the connection topology models and the flexible Soapstone control plane, Hammerhead has taken PBT all the way to that revenue goal. A generalized services infrastructure is what every network operator worldwide is really trying to build to prepare their networks for the opportunities—and competition—of the future. Hammerhead gets them there.” Tom Nolle |
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