MAY 28, 2008 By Meghan Fuller Hanna -- After more than four years of development, startup Zeugma Systems this week announced the launch of its Zeugma Services Node (ZSN), a broadband edge product that belongs to a new class of equipment known as the service delivery router. Company representatives say the ZSN combines "staggering" computing and networking horsepower in a single device, enabling broadband service providers to identify and monitor session flows on a per-subscriber, per-service basis.
Broadband providers today are in an economic Catch-22, contends Kevin Walsh, vice president of marketing for Zeugma Systems. The only viable path forward is to add relevant value to the services they provide to consumers, but that would require a capital investment. And today's broadband service providers "aren't going to invest a nickel unless they believe it will produce a material increase in average revenue per user."
"The question, therefore, is how can they add value, create services, and improve the subscriber experience in such a way that somebody is willing to pay them for it," Walsh contends.
The answer, he says, is the Zeugma Services Node.
Zeugma believes today's broadband service providers lack a critical functionality: the ability to identify and monitor each and every session flow traversing their network. Once they have that ability, says Walsh, "they'll find themselves in a position where the can better manage, from a quality-of-service standpoint, those traffic flows and even, possibly, customize some of those traffic flows."
The company says its ZSN enables service providers to:
• Rapidly prototype and launch revenue-generating services;
• Identify and monitor session flows on a highly granular per-subscriber, per-service basis;
• Manage session flows to enforce policy-based quality of service and capacity;
• Develop applications that add value to individual session flows; and
• Reduce the number of devices required for broadband aggregation and subscriber management.
Walsh acknowledges that, given where the ZSN sits in the network, there are certain applications that must be considered "the ante to play in the game. You need to do routing and subscriber management and service management and broadband aggregation," he says. The ZSN provides these functions as well as "new building blocks," among them a linearly scalable compute grid comprising a number of compute blades. At its fullest capacity, says Walsh, the ZSN can scale up to 520,000 DMIPS or Dhrystone millions of instructions per second, which is the equivalent of about 27,000 first-generation Pentium personal computers.
This computing power is coupled with the second building block, a 720-Gbit unidirectional traffic capacity. In short, says Walsh, "we provide an awful lot of computing horsepower with an awful lot of traffic horsepower in a system that is really right-sized for networks that are likely to encounter a lot of video traffic."
Designed for high-speed broadband aggregation and traffic forwarding, the ZSN's traffic blades also include deep packet inspection (DPI) capability. While other vendors sell standalone DPI devices, Zeugmas' DPI functionality is embedded within the service delivery router to enable service providers to identify what's going on in their networks. "Once we know that, we can query entitlements, we can do the appropriate queuing for bandwidth management purposes, we can monitor what's going on from a QoE standpoint, and we can generate settlement records for billing purposes," Walsh explains.
The third piece of the puzzle--where the compute grid really comes into play--is the Zeugma Open Application Sandbox, which operates much like a Windows or Linux operating system. In fact, says Walsh, Linux and Windows are sandboxes. "They allow applications to run within that sandbox, they give them access to APIs so they can control what's going on in the system underneath, but they shield the application from external threats and from each other and from the system itself. Just like a Windows operating system, if an application starts misbehaving, it won't affect other applications, and it can be taken out of service without impacting the performance of the overall system," he notes. "This is exactly the way the Zeugma Open Application Sandbox operates."
With these building blocks in place, the broadband service provider can then begin to selectively promote certain traffic going to certain devices within targeted subscriber households. "We have that level of visibility to know that this particular Netflix video flow is going to a big-screen TV, and this next one over here is going to an Apple TV window on a PC somewhere," Walsh muses. "We have a lot of highly granular traffic classification capability and a bandwidth management function that understands how much bandwidth is available in the network and allocates that as appropriate on a per-subscriber, per-service basis."
The Zeugma Services Node is generally available, and the company reports that active trials are underway with several Tier-1 service providers in North America and Europe, one of which is BT.
For more information and analysis about the type of new, revenue-generating services that devices like the ZSN could enable, visit The Lightwave Blog
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