The Nortel Networks
Passport 8600
Nortel Networks Passport 8600 Routing
Switch provides wire-speed switching and
routing with carrier grade reliability. It is a
key component of the Nortel Networks
Optical Ethernet solution delivering
Gigabit Ethernet performance and Quality
of Service (QoS) for business critical
applications and services such as Internet
Telephony. The Passport 8600 provides
128 Gbps of switching capacity, a variety
of 10/100, Gigabit Ethernet, Packet over
SONET and ATM ports, and a high
performance infrastructure for flexible
routing and switching.
Features
The Alteon WSM is an integrated Web
Switch blade with 4 external, non-blocking
Web Switching multi-speed ports, available
with both 1000BASE-SX and RJ-45
10/100BASE-T connections. The blade is
managed from within the 8600 operating
environment, while a maintenance port
provides additional debugging capability.
The blade occupies one I/O slot in the
8600, and up to eight can be installed in a
single system.
High Availability
The Alteon WSM is designed to enable a
highly available data center with no single
point of failure. Central to that design is
the use of the Virtual Router Redundancy
Protocol (RFC 2338), ensuring fast failover
in the event of failure. The Alteon WSM
can operate in active/active, active/standby,
and hot standby modes to ensure non-stop
operations while providing parallel
processing of Web traffic. The 8600
platform also offers a long list of carrier
grade features, including redundant fabrics
with sub-second failover, redundant CPUs,
redundant power, and a CO grade chassis.
Unique Distributed
Processing Architecture
Delivers Performance
and Scalability
Leading the industry, the Alteon WSM
enables the processing of entire Web
sessions at blazing speeds using Layer 4
through 7 information such as TCP port
numbers, URLs, HTTP headers, and
HTTP cookies. New capabilities also
enable the WSM to support Layer 7
regular expression, and to perform
switching based on a combination of Layer
7 attributes, such as URL plus host header,
URL plus cookie, or cookie plus host
header. Each Alteon WSM can process up
to 296,000 sessions per second per module
through the use of Nortel Networks next-
generation Alteon network processing
ASIC, the WebIC
TM
. Performance is
scalable up to 2.4 million sessions per
second. The Alteon WSM features 10
purpose-built WebICs, 20 RISC proces-
sors, and 80MB of memory for processing
session traffic. For data centers performing
even more compute-intensive tasks, such as
the decryption and encryption of SSL
traffic, the Alteon WSM is easily integrated
with Nortel Networks' revolutionary
Alteon Integrated Service Director
(iSD) platform.
Alteon WEB OS –
The Industry-Leading
Traffic and Application
Control Software
The Alteon WSM supports all of Nortel
Networks best-in class Alteon Web OS
applications. Server Load Balancing
optimizes existing servers, enables trans-
parent additions, and features linear
performance increases as more servers are
added. Firewall Load Balancing extends
these benefits to firewalls as well, while
comprehensive health checking ensures
that all devices are operating at peak
efficiency. Web Cache Redirection enables
the use of transparent Web caches wherever
possible, and improves performance by
moving them out of the data path.
Innovative Content Intelligent Switching
allows traffic management based on
content attributes including HTTP
headers, HTTP cookies, and URLs as well
as combinations of them, enabling session-
level persistence, virtual hosting, and the
best use of resources. Bandwidth
Management features enable the creation
of guaranteed or preferential bandwidth
services based on Layer 7 attributes, while
Global Server Load Balancing directs the
user to mirrored content. Unlike
competing products, the most current Web
OS software release is offered simultane-
ously on both the stackable and modular
product lines. This brings the WSM all the
benefits of a Web OS field-hardened in
over 10,000 customer sites.
The Alteon WSM also adds unique
features to enable new, highly profitable
services. One such service opportunity
is streaming media using Real Time
Streaming Protocol, or RTSP. The Alteon
WSM is able to intelligently switch both
the control and media sessions to the same
RTSP server or cache, and maintain session
level persistence. Another service
opportunity can be seen in the widespread
popularity of wireless Internet access.
The Alteon WSM is able to intelligently
load balance WAP gateway servers,
adding scalability, reliability, health
checks and unparalleled persistence to
wireless operations.
Web OS also provides the functionality to
assist in intrusion detection system scala-
bility, performance and availability.
Intrusion Detection Server load balancing
allows multiple intrusion detection servers
to operate in parallel and ensures that all
sessions entries are maintained and sent to
the same ID server. This solves the inherit
limitations of Intrusion Detection Systems,
which include lack of scalability and
throughput, by ensuring server availability
and persistency via health checking and
sophisticated redirection filters.
