[August 30, 1999]

Spring Tide Announces New IP Service Switch

Spring Tide Networks, Inc., a developer of service-intelligent equipment for network service providers, announced that its new IP Service Switch incorporates communications processors manufactured by MMC Networks, Hi/fn and IRE. These network, encryption/compression, and cryptographic processors are tightly integrated in Spring Tide's Pipelined PacketFlow architecture, and provide the processing power that enables the platform to terminate and switch more than 100,000 secure tunnels at full-line speed with minimum latency.

Spring Tide's IP Service Switch 5000 is a new class of carrier product that delivers the network intelligence necessary to support widespread deployment of network-based VPNs and other value-added IP services. It integrates multiple functions in a highly scalable, carrier-class platform, creating a new IP service layer for the public IP network. As a versatile platform for rapidly deploying new IP services, the IP Service Switch complements existing access and backbone equipment, and provides a single delivery point for service provisioning and billing.
Spring Tide's 5000 is based on the company's breakthrough Pipelined PacketFlow architecture, and utilizes MMC's AnyFlow 5500 network processors, Hi/fn's 7711 encryption/compression processors, and IRE's SafeNet DSP cryptographic processors. Capable of applying a unique set of bitstream processing functions to each flow, the 5000 can handle multiple functions at wire speed per session-level flow, including encryption, compression, filtering, classification, tagging, queuing, and address translation.

"A carrier-class platform capable of supporting a broad range of IP services must be architected to handle bitstream processing functions such as QoS, encryption, and compression at line speed," said Steve Akers, co-founder, CTO, and vice president of product development at Spring Tide. "In order to achieve this goal, we chose to incorporate multiple special-purpose processors in our design. General purpose processors are extremely inefficient at QoS, encryption, and compression processing. Developing our own ASICs was not a feasible alternative, due to time-to-market constraints, so we selected the best of what MMC, Hi/fn and IRE had to offer."

Spring Tide's 5000 utilizes MMC Networks' AnyFlow 5500 network processors to mediate between the service characteristics of an ATM switch and a packet switch, and MMC's packet processors to support silicon-based classification, queuing, and bit-field operations. The 5000 also uses Hi/fn's 7711 processors to support up to eight gigabits of encryption capacity combined with its LZS compression capability. IRE's SafeNet DSP processors are used to accelerate cryptographic functions such as public key generation, enabling the 5000 to calculate more than one thousand keys per second.

"Spring Tide's use of multiple vendor special-purpose communications processors, implemented in a parallel processor mode within their PipeLined PacketFlow Architecture, has allowed them to successfully balance the corporate objective of early time-to-market product delivery and the customer objective of a state-of-the-art carrier-class platform with the required processing power to meet and surpass future scalability needs," said Frank Dzubeck, president of Communications Network Architects, Inc.

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