networkZONE Products for the week of January 13, 2003
Radlan Says . . .
High Availability - Radlan's OpENS Software Enables
Enterprise-Grade Switching and Routing Designs
The new OpENS 7.30 release features advanced networking and
management software on fixed, stackable and high-availability chassis product
line
Radlan , Inc., is pleased to offer its new Open and Portable Embedded Networking Software - OpENS 7.30. This version features Enterprise-grade networking applications including advanced security, access control, QoS, and IP routing.
OpENS 7.30 is pre-integrated with the leading switching ASICs and is available now on Radlan's entire line of merchant system platforms - OpENSolo fixed configurations, OpENStack stackable systems and OpENSelect modular chassis. These merchant systems are available in 24/48 port Fast and Gigabit Ethernet among other configurations.
"In today's competitive market, the need for excellence and added value is even more significant then in the past. What Radlan is offering is a cost-effective system solution integrated with the most advanced software feature set, all fully tested and quality assured," Stephen Balacco, Embedded Software Analyst with Venture Development Corporation. "This new merchant systems concept is a natural migration from the successful merchant silicon penetration to the networking market during the past decade."
OpENS 7.30 adds full support for security and access control features such RADIUS, TACACAS, 802.1x and SSH/SSL encryption, as well as an advanced QoS mechanism such as Layer-3/4 priority queuing, flow classification and DiffServ support. This version includes complete Layer 2/3 switching and routing features with the addition of 802.1w Rapid Spanning Tree, 802.3ad LACP, DVMRP, and VRRP. OpENS 7.30 offers enhanced management through web-based or CLI applications; both of which are easily customized by OEMs to their specific "look&feel" needs.
"Radlan is continuously looking to expand its solution to fit the high-end enterprise and metro access markets. OpENS 7.30 features all of the latest routing, security and QoS needs, and is designed for Enterprise-grade standalone, stackable and chassis systems," said Yuval Cohen, Radlan's CTO. "Our merchant systems are designed for high availability wiring closet backbone, aggregation and access switching and routing installations."
"Radlan's OpENS 7.30 is being integrated with Marvell's standalone,
stackable and chassis production kits, highlighting new features such as
flow classification and security," said Nafea Bishara, Marvell's Vice
President of Technology and Strategy Development. "Production kits
with industry-leading Marvell Gigabit Ethernet technology and Radlan OpENS
embedded routing and switch management software allow OEMs to bring new
products to market in record time."
analogZONE Says . . .
While most of my product reviews to date involve chips and other hardware, I recognize that in many networking applications, software can comprise up to 80% of a product design effort. It's no surprise then that I'm doing my best to start covering companies like Jungo, LVL 7, Radlan , and Teja, who specialize in communications-related software and development tools. I'm reviewing Radlan's latest release because all of its recent work has been focused on telecomm applications, and OpENS 7.30 represents their efforts to provide an enterprise-class product that retains the high reliability while providing the richer feature set expected of this sort of application.
Radlan's package claims to bring both high availability and redundancy to their switching/routing software for a variety of merchant chip sets, and from what I can tell, it delivers. Operating at Layer 3, where the core of an enterprise switch usually operates, the software was designed to enable creation of a "double star" topology that permits a backup router to reach each node in the event of a failure.
And speaking of reliability, the software also supports Layer-2, 802.1W - the enhanced spanning tree protocol. This allows one redundant link to be inactivated to prevent destructive loops in the data paths, but keeps it on hot standby for quick recovery. This is important for high-availability applications since 802.1W improves recovery time from the 30-60 s required by the original spanning tree algorithm to under 1 s.
OpENS 7.30 also supports 802.3ad - the Link aggregation control protocol (LACP ) which lets switches trunk multiple links together without creating re-ordering and re-transmit problems in the upper layers. Besides supporting increased capacity, employing LACP over multiple links allows networks to have a graceful failure mode if one feed fails.
This latest version also has added security features, including the SSH (switch management), SSL (session management) and 802.1x authentication, access control, and security protocols.
As always, Radlan provides a suite of QoS features and algorithms that can be applied to your target system. The baseline software package supports up to eight priority queues as well as DifServ. The only caveat I'll add here is that, as with any switching software, it can only deliver the amount of the underlying silicon can support. Michael Orr, Radlan's vice president of engineering, explained to me that the different chip sets they support have different numbers of buffers, registers, and other hardware mechanisms for handling priority queuing. While software can be used to, say, compensate for the fact that a chip set has only four hardware priority queues, it can lead to unexpected software issues when trying to implement complex QoS algorithms.
This is in no way a mark against Radlan's product, but simply a reminder that you cannot completely mask an architectural deficiency with software. With this, and any other multi-platform product, I'll suggest that even though a reference design says it supports a particular feature, you should look very closely at underlying the silicon to verify there are adequate provisions in the hardware. I am confident, however, that Radlan's long-time experience in such matters helps it do as good a job as is possible at mapping a particular feature set onto the hardware target architecture it is pointed towards.
I have not done much programming for the last decade or so, and am not completely up to speed on many of the features and functions Radlan has incorporated into its development. But from the lengthy talk I had with them, it appears that they have done an excellent job at providing a graphics-oriented development environment that is feature-rich, flexible, and relatively easy to use. Nevertheless, they recognize that not everyone is comfortable with a graphic interface. For those die-hards who prefer a command line interface to program in, Radlan supplies a fully-customizable CLI definition tool that takes any user-defined or hardware-specific commands and creates a custom CLI for you.
Of course no technology is without its fashion trends, and switches are no exception. In a nod to the latest architectural fad OpENS 7.30 supports stacking, an architectural concept that allows low-cost "pizza box" products to be aggregated into larger switch arrays via a high-capacity uplink channel. Radlan's software creates an abstraction layer that "hides" some of the more complicated stacking functions from upper switching layers. Radlan's reference designs support the uplink, and protocols, that allow multiple boxes to be managed as a single unit. What's even nicer is that the modular approach they take allows you to use 95% of the same software for both chassis and stacking routers. Stacking functions are handled as separate device drivers which can be customized to meet design needs from the lower layer but hides the differences from the upper layer.
Radlan's reference software also includes support
for power over Ethernet (PoE.) The ability to deliver power to networked
devices over an Ethernet cable is an important trend which will probably
become very popular, for driving smaller workgroup switches and WLAN access
points which may or not be located near a convenient 110-V ac source. It
should also find great popularity in line-powered IP phones and in IP-based
PBXs.
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