11/28/2006 -- You might have missed it in the long holiday buildup, but Cisco Systems Inc. earlier this month snapped up another networking vendor, in this case carrier Ethernet specialist Greenfield Networks.

It was a smart move for Cisco, which gains access to Greenfield's Packetry II silicon. "As Ethernet continues to make its way into the fabric of all service provider and enterprise networks, the move could enable Cisco to offer highly cost-effective and robust solutions by leveraging its in-house silicon capabilities," wrote Glen Hunt, a principal analyst for carrier infrastructure with consultancy Current Analysis. "Vendors of next-generation metro Ethernet equipment face the complex challenge of building systems that integrate all the required carrier-grade features, but at the same time need to keep the costs down to deliver on low-cost Ethernet access."

Enter Packetry II, said Hunt: It's a merchant silicon solution that offers a combination of cost-effective GigE connectivity, integrated traffic management capabilities and advanced features -- including scalable tables and buffering, IPv4, IPv6, MPLS, VPLS, Q-in-Q, hierarchical QoS and traffic policing and shaping. "Packetry II offers a scalable and high-performance silicon platform for fixed/stackable and chassis-based systems that can scale from the edge to the core of metro area networks," he wrote. "This flexible architecture delivers intelligent services for triple play/IP convergence by bringing the best of both worlds --the performance/cost optimization of silicon and the flexibility of network processors to keep pace with emerging standards. The Packetry II Architecture delivers wire-speed performance for all features."

That should translate into immediate benefits for Cisco. "Among the competitive positives of this event for Cisco is a reduced time-to-market of new carrier-class features following integration of the acquired technology into its family of metro Ethernet switches," Hunt wrote. "Also, both Cisco and Greenfield are members of the MEF and are committed to delivering MEF-compliant Ethernet services, and the Packetry II architectural platform supports carrier-grade Ethernet services such as IPv4/IPv6, MPLS, Layer 2 and 3 VPN support plus traffic management and IP/GRE tunneling."

The Greenfield acquisition isn't all upside, of course. "The major concerns ... center around Greenfield's existing vendor relationships, such as Harbour Networks, Accton and Huawei-3Com, where Greenfield's Packetry chipset was to be the foundation for their high-feature Ethernet products," he concluded. "Cisco has a strong track record for executing on technology acquisitions, [but] some risk is always present when dealing with people and technology maturity. Care should be taken to ensure a smooth product migration for existing and future platforms to maintain investment protection." -- Stephen Swoyer