Lightstorm Network’s newest carrier Ethernet solution, the Hudson OAM service accelerator, is now sampling, according to an announcement today. Hudson greatly expands Lightstorm’s Operations, Administration, and Maintenance capabilities.

 

“Up until this point, the acceptance of carrier Ethernet in communications frameworks has been limited by the lack of hardware designed to support both Ethernet OAM and maximize scalability,” said Lightstorm’s director of product marketing Stephen Christo. “What we are doing is truly taking Ethernet OAM to the next level. The Hudson device effectively removes the burden of analyzing and generating continuity check messages from software, thereby scaling the number of connections while minimizing CPU utilization. As a result, the customer gains better performance and a significantly enhanced user experience.”

 

With networks turning to Ethernet-centric solutions and replacing existing infrastructures, one of the main obstacles faced by developers is offering the same or better OAM functionality. Carrier Ethernet’s success is largely dependent on giving service providers the same management framework and tools they have used with prior technologies. In order to see to that, the network must track services health by monitoring CCMs, as often as every 3.3ms.

 

Supporting IEEE 802.1ag and ITU Y.1731 connectivity fault management (CFM) protocols, Hudson lets Brooklyn-10 based systems process continuity check messages (CCMs) on thousands of services without the kind of software intervention seen with a lot of the current solutions on the market.

 

It is anticipated that next generation carrier Ethernet systems will be able to manage between 1,000 and 8,000 services--impossible if monitoring of CCMs is performed in only control plane software. By offloading the filtering and processing, system OEMs can return the CPU to doing exception handling and other processing functions, while offering the restoration services and robust protection sought by carrier networks.

 

The Hudson device arrives a mere three months after Lightstorm Networks launched the Brooklyn-10, the first Ethernet switch Application Specific Standard Product (ASSP) built specifically for the carrier market.