SAN JOSE, Calif., May 9, 2001 Building on its established portfolio of Multiprotocol Label
Switching (MPLS) product offerings, Cisco Systems, Inc., the worldwide leader in networking for
the Internet today announced its Ethernet over MPLS (EoMPLS) metro-based network solution
developed on the Cisco 7600 Optical Services Router (OSR) platform, the high-performance, IP
services-optimized router designed for service providers.
To highlight the benefits of MPLS in general, and EoMPLS for metro aggregation specifically,
Cisco also announced today that it is participating in the EoMPLS technology demonstration at the
InteropNet Labs (iLabs) at Networld + Interop 2001 Las Vegas, at the Las Vegas Convention
Center, May 6 through May 11. The iLabs is N+I's test bed addressing advanced protocol
development and vendor interoperability, and has been instrumental in the development and
interoperability testing of MPLS, as well as many other networking technology standards.
As service providers proceed with their deployments of high-speed metro area networks, they are
finding that their customers require a combination of transparent Local Area Networking (LAN)
services and Internet access services. With the addition of this new EoMPLS feature on the Cisco
7600 OSR, Cisco will be able to satisfy both of these customer requirements using
standards-based MPLS technology.
"We have installed Cisco's EoMPLS functionality in our test network and have evaluated its
functionality," said Steve Baker, Chief Technology Officer of 360networks. "Based on this
evaluation, as well as our confidence in Cisco's proven ability to deliver MPLS technology in a
variety of products, we intend to deploy Cisco's EoMPLS in our network to meet our customers
needs for transparent LAN services."
The EoMPLS functionality developed by Cisco is fully compliant with the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF) Martini draft RFC. Some of the features contained in Cisco's implementation
of EoMPLS include:
- Support for spanning tree on EoMPLS Virtual LANs (VLANs) to all multiple transport paths for a VLAN.
- Ability to configure traffic shaping on a per VLAN basis.
- Setting MPLS Class of Service (CoS) per VLAN to allow for different service classes per VLAN.
- Label-Switched Path (LSP) setup using the MPLS Label Distribution Protocol (LDP).
is a great opportunity for service providers to observe this new functionality in action," said Seenu
Banda, senior director of Product Marketing in the Internet Systems Business Unit at Cisco.
Availability
Release of the EoMPLS functionality on the Cisco 7600 OSR is expected in June, 2001.
