April 9, 2004 Newark, CA -- Responding to emerging business opportunities for service providers to deliver Virtual LANs (VLANs) on metro Ethernet networks, Larscom recently announced what it claims is a significant software upgrade for the Orion 7400 Ethernet over SONET (EoS) multi-service access platform.
Service providers are currently challenged in supporting transparent VLAN services to their multi-site enterprise customer base due to existing limitations in their Ethernet network infrastructure. Larscom's Orion 7400 multi-service access platform provides three significant features: 1) Ethernet "Q-in-Q" VLAN Tagging support; 2) Advanced Ethernet Performance Management for Service monitoring; and 3) Dynamic WAN bandwidth allocation using LCAS capability. Additionally, the Orion 7400 Release 2 software breaks new ground by providing a full suite of SONET performance parameters for its 10/100 and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, enabling providers to support a variety of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) by utilizing advanced performance reporting capabilities. The Orion 7400 offers its management capabilities via industry standard TL1, SNMP, and HTTP web GUI interfaces.
"This product release is a significant step forward in the delivery of scalable, transparent VLAN services, in that it is the first EoS solution that can support the extra large Ethernet frames generated by Ethernet switches," reports Gurdip Jande, vice president of marketing at Larscom. "Our service-provider customers have found that their legacy gear often does not support frames this large and are now turning to the Orion 7400. Our solution enables providers to roll out nested VLAN services over legacy SONET equipment. This advantage has allowed the Orion 7400 to be deployed in VLAN applications as well as the more traditional Ethernet WAN transport applications," he adds.
Larscom's OrionI7400 release-2 software is available today, and units already deployed are upgradeable.