Juniper Looks to Redefine Networking

Juniper hopes to seize the Web 2.0 day by offering enterprise and service provider customers with a new set of cutting-edge networking technologies, which it introduced today at the New York Stock Exchange.

With telcos looking to provide better services at higher margins, and enterprise customers needing to meet surging demand for bandwidth to support IP-based video, telephony and collaboration tools, Juniper unveiled routers based on a new processor architecture that it claims is several orders of magnitude faster than anything else on the market.

Pradeep Sindhu, Juniper’s founder, vice chairman and CTO, said that the new chipset, dubbed Junos Trio, represents "a fundamental advance in performance, flexibility and power efficiency… This will dramatically change the economics for our customers, while helping them create new and better experiences for their customers.”

According to the company, Junos Trio is the industry’s first “network instruction set” – a new silicon architecture unlike traditional application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and network processing units (NPUs). The new architecture leverages customized “network instructions” that are designed into silicon to maximize performance and functionality, while working closely with Junos software to ensure programmability of network resources. The new Junos One family thus combines the performance benefits of ASICs and the flexibility of network processors to break the standard trade-offs between the two, said Sindhu.

Built in 65-nanometer technology, Junos Trio includes four chips with a total of 1.5 billion transistors and 320 simultaneous processes, yielding total router throughput up to 2.6 terabits per second and up to 2.3 million subscribers per rack. Junos Trio includes advanced forwarding, queuing, scheduling, synchronization and end-to-end resiliency features, helping customers provide service-level guarantees for voice, video and data delivery. Junos Trio also incorporates power efficiency features to reduce power and cooling costs and lower the greenhouse gasses associated with data centers and service provider networks.

The new MX series router Juniper also introduced today, the MX80 3D, is based on the Junos Trio chipset and operating system and allows customers to configure their networks on the fly, based on changing bandwidth, subscriber and service requirements. "It's that fungibility that's making a big difference in what we're delivering," said Kim Perdikou, executive vice president and general manager of Juniper’s infrastructure products group.

The new Junos software platform includes upgrades to the Junos network operating system, a new Junos Space network application platform, and new Junos Pulse integrated network client. The Space application platform includes a Web-based virtual appliance that can be used to provision networks remotely, analyze network changes before implementing them, and automate failure monitoring and incident tracking. It is also designed to serve as a platform for application development, with Juniper promising to deliver a software development kit based on open APIs in the first half of next year.

Perdikou also said the company is working on a new project, dubbed Falcon, which will allow customers to switch both fixed-line and wireless traffic using the same equipment. "It's not just one box built for one service, it's a platform for all services," she said.

Pricing won't be released until Nov. 1. Wendy Cartee, vice president of product marketing, said the MX80 3D will be priced on a par with relevant Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent products "on a system basis," but will be less expensive on a per-port basis.