Riverstone Networks

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Riverstone Networks, was a provider of networking switching hardware based in Santa Clara, California. Originally part of Cabletron Systems, and based on an early acquisition of YAGO, it was one of the many Gigabit Ethernet startups in the mid 1990's. It is now a part of Lucent Technologies.

Contents 1 Company History 2 Products 2.1 15000 Family 2.2 RS Family 3 ES Family

[edit] Company History

• 18th April 2006 - Lucent Technologies are currently in the process of a merger of equals with Alcatel
• 21st March 2006 - Lucent Technologies wins the auction for Riverstone Networks over rival Ericsson. The final price was $207 million
• 7th February 2006 - Riverstone's partner Lucent Technologies signed an Asset Purchase agreement to acquire Riverstone Networks

[edit] Products

All of Riverstone Networks products are geared towards IP over Ethernet, often for a Metro Ethernet solution. All the products are multilayer switches (or switch-routers) and specialize in MPLS VPNs.

[edit] 15000 Family

The 15000 Family (referred to as the 15K) differs from the RS family as the 15K is not flow-based. Flow-based routers use the main CPU to process new flows and packets through the switch. The 15K differs by letting the line card processors do the work for the network traffic, leaving the main CPU to work on the system itself. This type of network processing is similar to Cisco's dCEF.

The 15K products are based on a different operating system than other Riverstone products, called ROS-X. It is designed to be modular and more like the common command line interface of Cisco.

• 15008 - The highest performance product currently from Riverstone. It supports a 96 port 10/100 Ethernet card, 12 or 24 port 1GB Ethernet cards and 1 or 2 port 10GB Ethernet cards. Support for ATM and PoS is planned for the future.
• 15100/15200 - Designed with the same architecture and operating system as the 15008, the 15100 and 15200 are designed more for an access/distribution network role. They are semi-modular in design with some fixed 1G Ethernet ports and GBIC uplinks for either 1GB or 10GB.

[edit] RS Family

The RS family of products are flow-based multilayer switches. They run ROS software, which has a command line interface but can also be configured via SNMP.

• 1x00 - Fixed hardware configuration
• 3x00 - Semi-modular in design, comes with 32 fixed 100BaseT Ethernet ports and 2 modular bays
• 8x00 - Fully modular hardware, comes in either 8 slot (8000) or 16 slot (8600). The modules for the 8x00 include Control Modules, 100BaseT Ethernet, 1000BaseT Ethernet, 1000BaseX GibabitEthernet with interchangeable GBICs, including PoS, ATM, Serial, T1/E1, and T3/E3.
• 38000 - Fully modular hardware, differs from the rest of the RS range physically due to the modular slots being vertical.

[edit] ES Family

• ES 2010 - Fixed 24 10/100 port multilayer switch designed for network access/network edge role. It has two GBIC ports for 1G Ethernet uplinks. The ES range does not support WAN ports or MPLS.