3/13/2006 -- As seminal post-punkers the Replacements once put it: Oooooh, Black Diamond. As of last week, that's one chorus that should be near and dear to the hearts of Extreme Networks and many of its customers.

Extreme unveiled the BlackDiamond 12K, a new carrier Ethernet switch designed to deliver data and triple-play services to both business and residential subscribers, support for thousands of users per platform, and provide known QoS.

"[I]t's a new and next generation platform that was specifically designed with carrier-class Ethernet Service delivery in mind. Using fourth generation ASIC technology, the platform supports a non-blocking architecture with hierarchical QoS and eight service levels per subscriber as well as being able to scale to support a large number of subscribers," says Jeff Ogle, a principal analyst for carrier infrastructure with consultancy Current Analysis.

Extreme's new offering is based on the same Extreme OS (XOS) underpinnings that power the company's other BlackDiamond Series products -– although the BlackDiamond 12K is powered by new, fourth-generation ASIC technology. "The BlackDiamond 12K offers a right-sized modular fault tolerant hardware platform ... [that is] optimized for line rate performance, including some overhead capacity for filtering and SLA performance monitoring," he comments.

It's an ambitious deliverable for Extreme, Ogle notes. More than that, however, the BlackDiamond 12K provides additional proof that the carrier Ethernet space is sizzling. "The market impact of this announcement by itself would be relatively minor in the overall scheme of things if it [were] simply an isolated new product claiming carrier Ethernet qualities. Instead, this is another of several vendor announcements that have come from both the major tier-1 players like the Alcatel 7450, Cisco 7604, and Siemens hiD6650, and the smaller niche players like the Foundry IMR 640 and Riverstone 15000," Ogle points out. "This market is the fastest growing carrier segment that has come along for some time, and everyone has taken notice and is getting very serious within this space."

In the carrier Ethernet space, Cisco should be able to parry Extreme's BlackDiamond gambit, Ogle says. "The 7600 ... has compelling CapEx advantages based on new Ethernet interfaces -- part of Cisco's SIP/SPA architecture known as I-Flex -- which have lowered its cost per port and increased its density. Cisco can also stress its IP DNA and broad breadth of management solutions," he concludes. "Additionally, Cisco can point out that it has added the 7604, which is optimized to deliver high availability 10GigE support for triple-play services for small PoPs and Internet gateways." -Stephen Swoyer