Vendor Profile: Laurel goes to the edge for fun

by Stephen Lawson

July 22, 2002 —

Atul Bansal says he didn't foresee the current slump in the service-provider core equipment business, nor the comparative strength of investment in gear for the network edge.

Bansal and five colleagues from FORE Systems who left the company in 1999 decided to develop an IP edge device simply because they thought it would be more interesting than a core product.

"There were different challenges at the core, and it became more of an engineering exercise" to simply make bigger, faster routers, Bansal says. The edge, on the other hand, was a creative opportunity.

Bansal and his colleagues formed Laurel Networks Inc., which makes a multiservice router to link existing services, such as ATM and frame relay, to new IP backbones. Laurel's ST200 Service Edge Router and Laurel Provisioning System are intended to serve two kinds of service providers: incumbents that now provide several services over different networks and want to combine those in an IP core; and new carriers that have an IP core and want to get customers on that backbone through the services with which they are familiar.

The company, based in Pittsburgh, far from the beehives of the network business, took a conservative approach to expansion, Bansal says.

"We do things when they're needed," he says. "The definition of a successful start-up was, you had to have 300 people. We had [about] 120 people when we shipped our first product [in January]." Since its founding in October 1999, the company has had no layoffs, he says.

Laurel took advantage of its "greenfield" opportunity to build an edge device from the ground up, combining Layer 2 switching and Layer 3 routing, and using network processors that can be reprogrammed with new capabilities.

The ST200 can take in ATM, frame relay and Ethernet traffic from a metropolitan network and send it over an IP core, using the IETF's Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) standard to maintain all the guaranteed service levels associated with those technologies. The programmable network processors, which perform all packet processing and forwarding at wire speed on ST200 line cards, aid the performance and scalability of the device, Laurel says.

The founders' concept paid off earlier this year when Laurel signed what it calls a major international deal - the companies declined to disclose the terms of the deal - with Level 3 Communications Inc.

So far, the large backbone provider has deployed ST200 routers live in 33 North American and European cities, according to Rob Hagens, senior vice president for global network engineering at Level 3.

Level 3 deployed the routers to provide secure edge-to-edge VPNs that can transport Layer 2 frames over MPLS, Hagens says. Those VPNs use a set of extensions to MPLS, commonly called MPLS Draft Martini after a lead developer, Level 3 Engineer Luca Martini. Level 3 chose Laurel because Level 3 believed it offered the broadest support for Layer 2 protocols, including ATM, frame relay and Ethernet, Hagens says.

The carrier began offering Ethernet services earlier this year and is now beginning to roll out ATM and frame relay services. The VPNs provide guaranteed quality of service from end to end, Hagens says.

Laurel's programmable architecture also paid off as the company refined its product for Level 3.

"As we have gone through beta test with Laurel, there have been minor tweaks we've wanted to make, and they've been able to make those quickly with their programmable . . . architecture," Hagens says.

By developing a Layer 3 router with Layer 2 capability from the ground up, Laurel has developed a type of product that will be important for the edges of emerging IP carrier networks, says Mark Seery, an analyst at RHK Inc.

"If you look at an ATM switch from someone like Cisco, it's really not a router in the sense that Laurel is building. For those networks that are aggressively moving toward convergence on IP and MPLS, Laurel is a much more optimized solution," Seery says.

Few carriers are pushing IP convergence now, but the technology has long-term potential, he says. By the same token, programmable chips like the ones Laurel uses are controversial now but might represent the next wave of network processors after less flexible ASICs.

However, deployment of devices such as the ST200 is still in its early stages, and it remains to be seen where and when significant demand will come from, analysts say.

Large-scale deployment will have to wait for acceptance from regional Bell operating companies and other established carriers, says Kevin Mitchell, an analyst at Infonetics Research.

"Most RBOCs don't even have a significant IP MPLS network to start with," Mitchell says. Still-emerging standards, such as Draft Martini, make the bigger carriers hesitant, he says.

"There's still a lot of stuff in flux . . . the incumbents are going to wait a while," Mitchell says.

IDG News Service