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Data Connection Announces DC-ISIS, Part Of Its Carrier-Class IP Routing Suite

DC-ISIS integrates with DC-BGP and DC-OSPF to provide a comprehensive IP Routing solution for highly scaled IP and Next Generation applications.

London, UK: July 30, 2002. Data Connection Limited (DCL), the leading provider of carrier-class communications protocol source code, today announced the addition of the Intermediate System - Intermediate System (IS-IS) protocol to its suite of IP Routing products.

IS-IS is an Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) designed to distribute routing information throughout a single Autonomous System (AS). It was originally developed to route ConnectionLess Network Protocol (CLNP) packets, but is now more often used to route IP packets. It is used by a number of major carriers.

"Adding DC-ISIS completes our suite of core IP Routing protocols," said Ben Miller, DCL's Vice President of Sales of Network Protocols. "DCL enters markets with the objective of providing the highest quality implementation available. IP Routing is no exception and we have invested heavily to include features such as redundancy and huge scalability from the start."

DC-ISIS is a flexible portable solution, designed for carrier-class applications, and includes a high level of function.

  • Full mandatory Integrated IS-IS protocol support (including function specified in ISO10589 and RFC1195)
    • IS-IS MIB support
    • IPv4
    • IPv6
    • CLNP
  • Optional enhancements to the protocol, including
    • Equal Cost MultiPath (ECMP)
    • Incremental Dijkstra algorithm
    • Authentication including password and HMAC-MD5 cryptography
    • Domain-wide Prefix Distribution
  • Other key features
    • Scalability support of up to thousands of interfaces and millions of routes
    • Building of routing tree can be paused to ensure other processing is not blocked by the computationally intensive calculation
    • Multiple instances of DC-ISIS support Virtual Routers
    • Replication of the link state database to minimize disruption on fail-over

DC-ISIS fits into the same architectural framework as DC-OSPF and DC-BGP. This framework includes two protocol independent components.

  • DC-Routing Table Manager (DC-RTM) component. DC-RTM can communicate with all routing protocols in a device, either supplied by DCL or third-party, to build a complete routing table. DC-RTM supports equal cost multipath routes, routes imported and exported between protocols, and multiple instantiation for hardware distribution and redundancy.
  • DC-Constraint-based Shortest Path First (DC-CSPF) calculator. DC-CSPF works with DC-OSPF and DC-ISIS. It provides traffic engineering network state information and calculates full source routes across a network, satisfying requested constraints. This component caches routing trees for similar requests, can calculate disjoint routes for protection and restoration, and supports multiple instances for distribution and redundancy.

DC-ISIS runs within DCL's existing high performance portable execution environment - the N-BASE. This provides extensive scalability and flexibility and enables the distribution of protocol components across different hardware configurations. The N-BASE has been ported to a large number of operating systems including VxWorks, OSE, pSOS, Chorus, Nucleus, Solaris, HP-UX and Windows NT, and has been used on all common processors including x86, i960, Motorola 860 and 8260, Sparc, IDT and MIPS. Proprietary OSs and chipsets can be supported with minimal effort. In addition, pre-ported solutions are available on a range of operating systems including VxWorks, OSE, Linux, Solaris and Windows.

Further Information

Further information on DC-ISIS can be found at www.dataconnection.com/iprouting/isis.htm.

About Data Connection Limited

Data Connection Limited (DCL) is the leading independent developer and supplier of IP Routing, MPLS, LMP, ATM, SIP, MGCP/Megaco, SCTP, Conferencing, Unified Messaging, Directory and SNA portable products. Customers include Calient, CIENA, Cisco, Corvis, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM Corp., Lucent, Microsoft, NEC, Nortel and Sun. Its MetaSwitch division develops and manufactures a carrier-class, next-generation Class 5 switch for telecommunications service providers. Data Connection is headquartered in London UK, with US offices in Reston, VA and Alameda, CA.

It was founded in 1981 and is privately held. During each of the past 19 years its profits have exceeded 20% of revenue. Last year sales exceeded $35M, of which 90% were outside the UK, mostly in the US. In 1999 the company received its second Queen's Award for outstanding export performance.

For information, contact Ben Miller by email at , phone +44 20 8366 1177, or visit our Web site at www.dataconnection.com.

Data Connection is a trademark of Data Connection Limited and Data Connection Corporation. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.