CONCORD, MASS. - Lucent this year is expected to overhaul its campus switching family with devices aimed squarely at rivals such as Cisco, Nortel Networks and 3Com.
Lucent is planning two routing switches - the campus Cajun P660 and backbone P880 - that will give customers greater port density, Gigabit Ethernet support, quality-of-service (QoS) control and lower per-port prices, especially on 10/100M bit/sec connections, according to users briefed on the plans.
Lucent declined to comment on impending announcements, but users say they've been told the 17-slot P880 features 24-port Ethernet switch cards for a maximum of 384 Ethernet connections. The box is designed to keep up with big next-generation routing switches, such as the Cisco Catalyst 8540 and Nortel's recently unveiled Accelar 8000.
The six-slot P660 is based on the same chassis as Lucent's current flagship P550 multilayer Ethernet switch. The box also will feature 24-port cards for up to 144 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet connections.
The P660 and P880 also will feature Gigabit Ethernet modules that can connect the switches and aggregate Ethernet connections with fiber backbones. The modules reportedly support four to eight Gigabit Ethernet ports per card, with the P880 supporting a maximum of 64 Gigabit Ethernet ports and the P660 handling up to 24 Gigabit Ethernet links.
Ed Packer, manager of network services for Cirent Semiconductor in Orlando, says he's intrigued by the higher port density of the P660. "Any time you have greater port density, that's a good thing," he says, citing the multiplying number of boxes at his facility.
Packer, who currently has 50 P550 Layer 2/Layer 3 switches installed, says the P880 will feature a 135G bit/sec backplane. The 46G bit/sec P550 currently maxes out at 120 Layer 2 ports or 72 Layer 3 ports.
Under Lucent's overhaul plan, code-named Cajun II, the P550 will receive hardware and software upgrades. For example, Lucent is considering a new 48-port 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet module for the P550 with a target price of less than $100 per port, according to an internal Lucent document obtained by Network World. That document also confirms plans for the two bigger switches.
The P880 leapfrogs Nortel's Accelar 8000 and Cisco's Catalyst 8540 multilayer routing switch in terms of the number of available payload slots - 17 for Lucent compared with 13 for Cisco and 10 for Nortel. But otherwise, many of the P880 features match those of big multilayer switches already shipping from these two vendors, as well as those from 3Com, Foundry and others.
For example, the P660 and P880, and possibly the new software release for the P550, will support the 802.1p QoS standard.
But for Lucent, building a following by adding features similar to those offered by competitors will be tough, according to Dell'Oro Group, a market research firm in Portola Valley, Calif. That's because Lucent only holds a 2.1% market share in Layer 3 switched Ethernet sales, Dell'Oro Group says.
Lucent is expected to try to compete on cost. In one indication of its pricing strategy, Lucent last week relaunched another product, the Cajun M770, as a combination ATM and Ethernet switch using dual-domain cell and frame switch fabrics, supporting up to 105 OC-3 ports for each protocol.
Lucent is positioning the M770, originally announced in October 1998, as its first true enterprise ATM switch. The box is priced as low as $29,000 for its minimum configuration of 15 OC-3 ports. The M770 supports features similar to those supported by FORE Systems' ASX-4000 ATM switch, but Lucent's price is half that of FORE's, says John Morency, director of network business practice for Renaissance Worldwide, a consulting firm in Boston. "This is one vendor that's finally giving FORE a run for its money in the ATM backbone," Morency says.
Lucent may have little choice but to push aggressively on per-port pricing for its Cajun line of LAN switches because of its lack of installed base and falling market prices (see The Scoop, this page).
Cajun - Lucent's brand name for Ethernet and ATM switching products for the campus - is derived from one of Lucent's data acquisitions, former Gigabit Ethernet start-up Prominet Corp. Right now Cajun switches are among the most expensive in the market. For the fourth quarter of 1998, Dataquest estimates Lucent's revenue in this area at $1,955 per port, higher than Cisco's $1,377 per port and Nortel's $1,891 per port.
This gives Lucent an 8% revenue chunk of the Gigabit Ethernet switch market, Dataquest says. "The Prominet box was a first-generation [Gigabit] Ethernet switch, but the world has moved beyond that," says Michael Speyer, associate director of network solutions at The Yankee Group in Boston. "If they're going to continue to play in the core of the enterprise, they're going to have to have a much bigger box."
Early Lucent users say much depends on their own applications.
For example, California Institute of Technology in Pasadena links hundreds of PCs through P550 switches, binding the PCs to act as a supercomputer. The next generation of that supercomputer will use the latest processors, so Caltech will need switches that can provide higher bandwidth, says Thomas Sterling, principal scientist at Caltech. o
