Data Connection Announces DC-OSPF and a Suite of Carrier-Class IP Routing Protocol Software.

Business Editors/Hi-Tech Writers

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 2, 2001

Highly Scalable Product family architected for Next Generation

Network requirements such as High Availability, VPNs, Traffic

Engineering and Protection Switching

Data Connection Limited (DCL), the world's leading provider of carrier-class communications protocol source code, today announced that it is adding the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol and a complete suite of IP Routing products to its industry leading range of carrier-class networking solutions.

This suite of protocols has been architected specifically for the reliability, scalability and extensibility requirements of the Next Generation Network.

DC-OSPF is a fully portable, source code solution, enabled for both packet and optical networking requirements. For packet based networks, it provides a highly scalable Routing Table implementation, can support Virtual Routing and VPN requirements, is fully integrated with DC-MPLS, and enables redundant and distributed hardware architectures.

In addition, DCL has used its leading expertise in optical control plane technology to extend DC-OSPF for use in optical networking. It supports separated signaling and data network topologies required for out-of-band signaling; it is integrated with first to market DC-LMP and DCL's industry leading GMPLS and OIF UNI implementations to provide optical OEMs a comprehensive control plane architecture.

"Over the last 15 years, we have developed leading expertise in software fault tolerance, modularity, scalability and portability," said Phil McConnell, CEO of DCL. "This expertise enables us to produce a more fully featured, more robust OSPF implementation than any that is presently available. We are therefore looking not just to improve our customers' time to market, but also to enhance the quality and potential of their overall product."

"The development of next generation networking requirements, such as VPNs, massively scaled routers and optical networking means that the existing OSPF solutions are simply not architected with modern requirements in mind. DC-OSPF is designed from the ground up with sophisticated redundancy support, no scaling limits and traffic engineering built in from the start," said Matthew Finlayson, DCL's General Manager of IP Routing solutions.

DC-OSPF is the first of a suite of carrier-class IP Routing solutions being developed by DCL, including BGP and ISIS. The solutions are fully integrated, with a common routing table and support for packet, optical and MPLS applications.

DCL has gone through an extensive requirements process by consulting with major customers in both the optical and packet domains. This ensures that DC-OSPF and DCL's other IP Routing solutions are tailored to the needs of the market, with the following features.

-- DC-OSPF is built to handle thousands of interfaces and millions of routes.

-- Routing table can be distributed to multiple locations enabling distributed
processing and ensuring that there is no single point of failure.

-- Multiple instances of the routing table can implement Virtual Routing
Forwarding tables for VPNs, with exporting of routes between OSPF, BGP, ISIS
and other protocols.

-- Multiple instances of DC-OSPF can implement Virtual Routers for VPNs or
other applications.

-- Full support for traffic engineering extensions to support MPLS
applications.

-- Constraint-based Shortest Path First (CSPF) engine to calculate full source
routes satisfying resource or routing constraints, including distribution to
multiple hardware locations and calculation of multiple disjoint routes for
protection switching and fast restoration.

-- Separation of data plane and control plane topologies to support the
out-of-band signaling requirements of optical networks.

DC-OSPF 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.

About Data Connection Limited

Data Connection Limited (DCL) is the leading independent developer and supplier of IP Routing, LMP, MPLS, SIP, MGCP/Megaco, SCTP, ATM, Conferencing, Unified Messaging, Directory and SNA portable products. Customers include Calient, CIENA, Cisco, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM Corp., Lucent, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, Sycamore, and Sun.

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 95% were outside the UK, mostly in the US, leading to the company's second Queen's Award for outstanding export performance.

For information, contact Ben Miller by email at [e-mail], phone [phone], or visit our Web site at http://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.