November 2001

 In this month's edition of Editors' Notebook:

• Follow-up: Kagoor Networks -- New Jersey Bound And Beyond
• Sun Burns Hot: Sun Fire 15K
• Enabling A Sea Of Opportunity: Pelago Networks

BY GREG GALITZINE

Sure enough, Kagoor announced the launch of their company together with the announcement of ITXC as their first customer. Since that time, Kagoor has announced a series of relationships with several other leaders in the IP telephony space, including dynamicsoft and VocalTec Communications, ironically enough, both from New Jersey as well.

dynamicsoft
The dynamicsoft news centers around the delivery of Kagoor's VoIP traffic management solution for SIP-based networks. As SIP continues to gain traction as the protocol of choice in next-generation networks, dynamicsoft is at the forefront of that charge, and Kagoor stands to gain access to a large and varied group of vendors by partnering with them.

"One critical element in ensuring a VoIP carrier's success in moving voice traffic from the PSTN to the IP network is the ability to provide the efficient, high-quality delivery of voice over IP networks," said dynamicsoft's Chief Scientist, Jonathan Rosenberg. "Kagoor's traffic management solution is designed to do just this and is an important technology in helping our customers make the transition to IP networks."

VocalTec
The relationship with VocalTec gives Kagoor access to many of the leading VoIP carriers. In fact, VocalTec products and solutions are deployed in over 100 VoIP networks throughout the world, giving Kagoor's VoiceFlow traffic management platform greater exposure to real-world traffic. Furthermore, under the terms of the agreement, both companies will participate in joint sales and marketing efforts aimed at further deploying the combined solution.

According to Ira Palti, VocalTec COO, "VocalTec is committed to empowering its customers with the most efficient, high-quality VoIP networks. By partnering with Kagoor, carriers and service providers will be able to optimize their networks' capacity and provide their customers toll-quality VoIP service."

Televideo International
When not pursuing business relationships in the Garden State, Kagoor has been busy overseas, in the Asia Pacific region. Clearly not wishing to miss out on the opportunity afforded by the potential market that is China, Kagoor has entered into an agreement with Link Televideo International Co., LTD to promote the adoption of the VoiceFlow platform and other associated applications.

Opher Kahane, co-founder and CEO of Kagoor Networks said, "The Asia-Pacific region is rapidly building out its VoIP networks. Our relationship with Link Televideo International will help us gain a foothold in the Asian market by way of China and pave the way for further expansion into other parts of the region in the near future."

Kagoor is headquartered in San Mateo, CA, with research and development facilities in Herzelia, Israel. The company is privately held, funded by venture capital firms ComVentures, Vantage Point Venture Partners, and Intel, as well as investments by Ed Kozel and Raj Singh.

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Sun Burns Hot: Sun Fire 15K

BY MIKE VON WAHLDE

Sun has taken this mantra to the borders of enlightenment with their new line of servers, culminating in the big box, the Sun Fire 15K.

The Sun Fire 15K server is built on an exceedingly scalable, general purpose architecture and is well suited for applications, from scientific and geographic study, to engineering or businness. With 106 processors, with 576 Gigabytes of memory, and 18 I/O hubs for networking and storage connectivity, it is the world's largest single cabinet UNIX server system. At nearly 2.5 times the MIPS
rating (millions of instructions per second) of the largest mainframe, the Sun Fire 15K server has a balanced high-performance server architecture and delivers industry-benchmark results in real-world applications, including SAP, Java platform performance, and high-performance computing.

"The Sun Fire 15K system is the culmination of an 18-month roll-out of our entire compatible product family," said John Shoemaker, Executive Vice President, Computer Systems, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Together with Sun StorEdge array, Solaris 8, our new service offerings, and our Sun Open Net Environment (Sun ONE) suite of software, the Sun Fire 15K offers customers a clear choice to improve their productivity while reducing cost of ownership and regaining control of their data centers."

Fire At the Heart Of Sun
Boasting a rough five miles of wiring, the Sun Fireplane interconnect, which offers unprecedented throughput, and critical for superior application performance, is at the heart of the system. With the ability to transfer 172 Gigabytes per second, this high-performance design enables solid performance across a wide range of applications.

Sun Fire 15K can have up to 106 third-generation 64-bit UltraSPARC III processors with the ability to scale beyond 1000 CPUs. The 900 MHz UltraSPARC III copper processor harnessed by the power of Solaris 8, enables linear scalability and application speed. The UltraSPARC processor roadmap supports field upgradeability to speeds of 1.8 Ghz and beyond. And with hot CPU upgrades, the Sun Fire 15K server enables resources to be added easily while the system is up and running.

The Sun Fire 15K server features 576 GB memory. This allows applications to run directly in exceedingly fast memory without having to access external storage devices. The large single-system memory also enables new capabilities for new and creative applications.

Mike Vildibill, Deputy Director of Resources for the San Diego Supercomputer Center, one of the first customers to use the Sun Fire 15K server, stated, "As one of the country's leading research and supercomputing facilities, the SDSC works on some of the world's most challenging biological, environmental, and computing issues. The Sun Fire offers the performance needed to support our data-intensive requirements ranging from storage management, relational databases, data mining, and data-intensive scientific applications such as those in bioinformatics. The solid reliability and manageability of the system allows us to deploy our most critical services. The combination of reliability and performance makes the Sun Fire a critical component to our IT infrastructure."

Consider Cost
The new Sun Fire 15K system includes features designed to radically reduce the
cost of ownership of large systems through server consolidation and mainframe application rehosting, while helping customers retain their investments in people, training, tools, and applications. The new Sun Fire 15K server supports cost reduction and uptime with features like:

• Concurrent, dynamic reconfiguration for simultaneous online maintenance;
• Full hardware redundancy that eliminates unplanned downtime; and
• Automatic failover for critical housekeeping and monitoring functions.

The Sun Fire 15K server includes secure domain architecture, as each of
the 18 Dynamic System Domains, is 100 percent fault-isolated; and enables the movement of CPUs and memory independent from and across other domains. Sun Fire 15K server shares common components with the midframe Sun Fire product line introduced earlier this year. This includes the "Uniboard" technology, which provides common CPU/memory boards, to enable common sparing in order to meet peak demand of resources. This inter-generational compatibility the simplicity and hot-swappability that data centers require.

Setting Up A Favorable Environment
The Solaris Operating Environment makes the new Sun Fire 15K scalable, available, manageable, and secure. Powerful capabilities such as the SunPlex clustering capability, Live Upgrade, Hot Patching, Dynamic Reconfiguration, Remote Monitoring, Resource Management, Bandwidth Allocations, and Automatic System Recovery minimize planned and unplanned downtime allow the Sun Fire 15K to achieve the high availability needed for mission-critical application services.

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Enabling A Sea Of Opportunity: Pelago Networks

BY MIKE VON WAHLDE

Pelago Networks, and their Odysea product offering, has focused on the issues concerning LECS, CLECS, and next-gen ICPs through the use of wireline and wireless broadband access networks. The Odysea family was designed to enable local service providers to speed the creation and rollout of new services at features, keeping in mind the fact that traditional voice and data services are still the bottom line, and should be cost-effectively managed. The Odysea family was engineered to integrate into existing network, service, and OSS architectures. The design allows Odysea to extend the value of existing Class 5/4, AIN/IN, and emerging softswitch service infrastructures, allowing for the development of new and exciting applications and services.

Optimized for delivering enhanced and converged services, the Odysea solution minimizes capitol costs. The Odysea family includes the Odysea Service Creation Environment (SCE), the Odysea Programmable Service Switch (PSX), and the Odysea Management Suite.

The SCE is a Java-based development toolkit with comprehensive libraries for application software development, testing, as well as the development of software for provisioning, management, and billing integration. In addition to providing comprehensive building blocks for service creation, the Odysea SCE lowers these barriers using intuitive, industry-standard development tools, APIs, and frameworks (including JCC/JAIN, JMF, JMX) to minimize an application developer's training and overhead development tasks such as security and management.

The Odysea PSX offers a single-chassis solution that simplifies service delivery by integrating a leading-edge media gateway, edge switch router, call agent, and application server. The Odysea PSX delivers full programmability through layered APIs into all of its resources and functionality. The architectural simplicity of the Odysea PSX enables the rapid deployment of both services created in the Odysea SCE as well as a complete set of traditional and enhanced turnkey applications such as 911, Caller ID, voice VPNs and one-number follow-me.

The Odysea Management Suite combines the essential elements for the configuration of network components and provisioning of services created and deployed within the Odysea family. The Odysea Management Suite also includes an object-oriented service provisioning environment including subscriber self-provisioning, a billing mediation server, and a CORBA-based service and element management system.

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