Highlights

NetIron IMR 640 Overview

The NetIron IMR 640 is the industry's most powerful IPv4/IPv6/MPLS router designed for enabling Service Providers to deploy high-capacity, cost-efficient, and profitable services. Based on the award winning NetIron 40G technology, TerathonTM, the NetIron IMR features Foundry's latest and state of the art network processor technology, Terathon-MTM.

Designed from the ground up as a highly capable Internet and Metro router, the NetIron IMR features wire speed, low latency and jitter, IPv4, IPv6, and MPLS routing for both provider edge and core applications. The NetIron IMR is also capable of wire speed, low latency & jitter L2 switching to allow for cost-efficient and seamless integration with L2 Metros or MAN access layers without any performance compromise.

In only 13 rack units, the platform accommodates up to 32 10-GbE port or 320 1-GbE ports offering Service Providers an immense traffic handling capability of up to 96 wire-speed 10-GbE ports or 960 wire-speed 1-GbE ports in a standard 7' rack.

The NetIron IMR supports a full suite of unicast and multicast IPv4 and IPv6 routing protocols. Supported IPv4 protocols include RIP, OSPF, IS-IS, BGP4, DVMRP, PIM-DM, PIM-SM, and IGMP. Supported IPv6 protocols include RIPng, OSPFv3, MP-BGP, PIM-SSM and MLD. Featuring Foundry Direct Routing (FDR) for full Forwarding Information Base (FIB) programming in hardware, together with hardware-based wire-speed ACLs and PBR, the NetIron IMR offers a high end, robust IPv4 and IPv6 routing solution that rivals competitor high end router platforms at a fraction of the cost.

As an enabler of high-value and profitable MPLS services, the NetIron IMR is the industry's first platform to offer all three popular MPLS VPN services on all ports: Virtual Leased Lines (VLLs), LDP-Based Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLSes), and BGP/MPLS VPNs as per RFC 2547. All services are available on all ports of the platform right out of the box without any additional cost to the Service Provider. For optimal deployment versatility, the NetIron IMR supports the creation of both traffic engineered infrastructures (using OSPF-TE, RSVP-TE, and CSPF) and non-traffic engineered infrastructures (using LDP) for the delivery of these MPLS services.

To facilitate seamless, high-performance integration with Layer 2 MANs and/or cost efficient Layer 2 access layers, the platform features wire-speed Layer 2 switching that can be effortlessly and seamlessly integrated with the platform's routing and MPLS services.

Concurrence of services is one of the key advantages of the NetIron IMR 640. By virtue of Foundry's powerful Terathon-M network processors, the platform features unprecedented intelligence that allows multiple routing and MPLS services to be combined on the same physical port(s). This allows Service Providers to deploy cost efficient service multiplexing as well as offer incremental services to their subscribers in order to grow Service Provider revenue.

Complementing the performance and functionality of the IMR is Service Provider grade scalability. The IMR features scalability that exceeds the requirements of today's most demanding Service Providers offering ample room for network and service growth. A single NetIron IMR chassis supports up to:

The NetIron IMR is designed for high availability; it features redundant and hot-swappable fans, power supplies and management modules. The NetIron IMR hitless management failover capability preserves traffic flows in the event of active management module failure for virtually zero impact on subscriber services. Built with stringent carrier-class environmental considerations, the NetIron IMR, is designed from the ground up to meet and go beyond NEBS Level 3 requirements.

To ensure strict enforcement and monitoring of Service Provider policies and SLAs, the IMR features a unique, cutting edge, hardware-based feature set.

Sample Applications

Carrier's Carrier-Long-Haul Backbones

The high BGP scalability of the NetIron IMR 640 makes it a perfect fit for carriers offering IP transport to a large number of other IP carriers. For such applications the backbone edge router is required to maintain a large number of peering sessions with client ISP routers, a large number of BGP routes in its BGP Routing Information Base (RIB), as well as – in some cases – hundreds of thousands of non-aggregated routes in its Forwarding Information Base (FIB) in hardware. By design, the NetIron IMR is capable of effectively addressing such scenarios offering carrier's carriers a lot of room for growth on a single chassis up to 500 BGP peers, 4 Million BGP routes, and 1 Million IPv4 routes in hardware.
Leveraging Foundry Direct Routing (FDR), the IMR offers high performance, secure, robust routing that is completely hardware driven ensuring wire-speed performance and ultra low latency.

For transporting the traffic over long distances, the NetIron IMR optics offer distances up to 40km for 10 GbE (with 80 km planned for a future release) and up to 150km for 1 GbE. In addition, the NetIron IMR supports XENPAK WAN PHY optics for 10 GbE thereby enabling connectivity to existing SONET/SDH OC-192/STM-64 infrastructures allowing for cost efficient transport up to thousands of kilometers.

IPv4/IPv6 ISPs

Designed for high end Service Provider grade routing, Foundry Direct Routing (FDR) offers wire-speed, highly scalable, hardware based routing for both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic. FDR relies on the programming of the complete Forwarding Information Base (FIB) in hardware to eliminate any software processing from the packet forwarding path. This offers Service Providers consistent high performance routing at all times regardless of the traffic patterns.

With IPv6 gaining popularity and increasing demand each day, the NetIron IMR with its dual stack wire-speed IPv4/IPv6 capability offers a smooth migration path to IPv6 for ISPs. Since the IMR is capable of routing both protocols on the same physical interfaces, ISPs can simply turn on IPv6 when needed without any performance sacrifice nor additional cost.

To ensure the enforcement of ISP security policies and policy based routing (PBR) rules, the IMR offers hardware-based wire-speed ACLs and PBR. In addition, granular per ACL clause accounting offers ISPs visibility into the effectiveness of the applied ACL rules allowing for better tuning when needed.

Supporting all three popular L2VPN and L3VPN services, the IMR allows ISPs to offer new value added services beyond traditional Internet access. By virtue of the Terathon-M network processors' multi-service capabilities, ISPs can start offering such value-added services to grow their revenue without bearing any additional cost.

Using the Terathon-M built-in sFlow capability, ISPs can gain real time insight into traffic loads, and traffic composition, allowing for better capacity planning, and troubleshooting in case of a network problem.

Cable and Multi-Service Operators (MSOs)

The NetIron IMR 640 offers a full suite of unicast and multicast routing protocols making it a perfect fit for both broadcast TV as well as video on demand delivery. With wire-speed routing capacity on each port, the IMR effectively addresses the huge bandwidth requirements of such Cable and MSO (triple play) networks.

In addition, the IMR offers the industry's lowest latency and jitter, less than 10 microseconds of latency and 2 microseconds of jitter, which makes it an ideal platform for transporting delay sensitive voice and video traffic.

Also, using the NetIron IMR, MSOs can scale their backbone bandwidth up to 80 Gbps per link in order to accommodate future demand for video, voice, and data services.
The high port density on the IMR makes it a highly attractive solution for multi-link backbone trunk connectivity as well as connectivity to large numbers of edge Gigabit Ethernet QAM devices, CMTS, and DMTS devices.

As the Cable and MSO Service Providers move towards IP based service delivery, it is anticipated that the increasing demand for millions of IP addresses may only be addressed using the abundant IPv6 address space. The NetIron IMR, with its native IPv6 support for both unicast and multicast, enables Service Providers to acquire large IPv6 address blocks and utilize those over the same infrastructure used for IPv4. This native dual stack capability of the IMR eliminates any potential bottle necks that may, otherwise, impede the growth of the Service Provider in the future.

Many MSOs have already started offering trial VPN services to the enterprise in order to broaden their service portfolio and revenue sources. Yet, due to limitations in incumbent equipment, they may be locked into one type of VPN service offering. The NetIron IMR 640, complemented by the suitable edge equipment, can eliminate today's limitations and enable MSOs to offer both L2 and L3 MPLS VPN services over one common infrastructure.