Enterprise router performance upped

Manhasset, N.Y. - Enterasys Networks Inc. has rearchitected its XSR enterprise router lineup to produce a tenfold improvement in packet-processing speed, while adding to its wide-area connectivity options with ADSL and T3/E3 cards. Citing its mantra of all-in-one security with remote management and control via a unified interface, the Andover, Mass., company is vying for a slice of the enterprise regional-office market now dominated by large incumbents such as Cisco Systems Inc.

Announced last year, the XSR line's 1805 and 1850 routers for branch offices are based on an IBM PowerPC processor and a SafeNet Internet Protocol Secure (IPsec) accelerator, and top out at 45,000 packets/second, or up to 200 tunnels. Equipped with only eight wide-area-network ports and two 10/100 Ethernet ports, the XSR line was found wanting when it came to tackling the requirements of regional and central-site-aggregation requirements, said Ben McLeod, director of product marketing at Enterasys.

"A branch office might have 15 to 25 remote users and a WAN throughput of 2 Mbits/s, so the PowerPC and SafeNet processor were adequate, along with support for eight T1/E1 lines," he said. "However, the regional office is a much larger operation, and so the new XSR3250 will support up to 24 TI/E1 pipes and up to 150 users."

To get the extra wire speed performance, the company opted for a Broadcom Corp. network processor (NPU) in combination with a HiFn Inc. accelerator. Together the two increase throughput to more than 400,000 packets/s, or over 3,000 tunnels. "Most of the performance leap comes from the NPU, as the HiFn accelerator is only in use when IPsec is running," said McLeod.

Such a leap in performance becomes especially important as firewalls, intrusion detection, virtual private networks and even network address translation get switched on, McLeod said. "You need a high-performance processor or you won't get wire speed operation."

The juiced-up routers come in four flavors that range in performance from the XSR-3020 at 200,000 packets/s and 1,000 tunnels, to the XSR-4100 at 500,000 packets/s and 5,000 tunnels. All have three 10/100/1000 LAN ports and leverage the same firmware and control-and-management architecture as the previous XSR 18xx lineup. But the WAN connectivity options, which use the company's network interface module (NIM) architecture, has been expanded from eight to 56 ports with new modules for T3/E3 and asymmetric DSL connections.

Each NIM module comes in one-, two- or four-port versions.

Pricing starts at $5,995 for the XSR-3020 with eight WAN ports, and goes up to $15,995 for the XSR-4100 central-site aggregator with up to 56 ports and full power supply redundancy.

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