Riverstone Networks
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-1990s. It is now a part of Alcatel-Lucent and its operations are being wound down via a Chapter 11 filing by their current owners. Products. All of Riverstone Networks products were geared towards IP over Ethernet, often for a Metro Ethernet solution. All the products were multilayer switches (or switch-routers) and specialized in MPLS VPNs. 15000 Family. The  15000 Family (referred to as the 15K) differed 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 differed 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 were based on a different operating system than other Riverstone products, called ROS-X. It was designed to be modular and  more like the common command line interface of Cisco. RS Family. The RS family of products were flow-based multilayer switches. They ran ROS software, which had a command line interface but could also be configured via SNMP.