Infrastructure provider Juniper Networks Tuesday launched its latest initiative to steal market share from rival Cisco Systems
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Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Juniper unveiled its new Networks T-series Internet routing family, including the introduction of the T640 Internet Routing Node, (code-named “Gibson”). The routers incorporate the company’s new Matrix technology and sell between $400,000 and $500,000 depending on configurations. The new routers are expected to pad the company’s 31 percent share of a $1 billion-plus high-end router market.
Based on Juniper’s third generation of high-density silicon, the company said the new T-series platform offers multi-terabit scaling at four times faster than the competition at a cheaper price.
For example, Cisco’s latest router, being used by Cox Communications , the 12416 has switching capacity of 320 Gigabits per second (Gbps), with 20 Gbps (10 Gbps full duplex) capacity per slot.
In a stand-alone configuration, the T640 Internet Routing Node supports 32 OC-192c/STM-64 ports in a half-rack chassis, and offers eight 40 Gbps slots.
The T640 Internet Routing Node enables 640 Gbps through the customer-facing ports and provides for 1280 Gbps through the rear of the chassis via an optical backplane extension. This nonblocking, any-to-any, multichassis configuration enables multiple T640 Internet Routing Nodes to interconnect and operate as a single router, while preserving valuable revenue-generating ports. Juniper said its Networks Matrix Technology will enable eight or more T640 Internet Routing Nodes to be connected in an Internet Routing Matrix to deliver 10 or more terabits of throughput, split equally between the front-panel Wide Area Network (WAN) ports and the matrix optical backplane extension.
The company also said its JUNOS Internet software allows better migration from existing M-series platforms to the new T-series. Juniper said the software has support for multiprotocol label switching and hardware-based IPv6 forwarding, which Juniper has been working on for months.
Juniper said the configuration of the two helps system administrators by giving them a platform for a wide range of services from Private IP and 2.5G/3G mobile, to asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and Frame Relay migration.
Currently, the T640 platform is being used by four new Juniper customers including Verio, France Telecom Research and Development and the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid Project. It has also been selected for the next-generation Internet2 Abilene network.
“With over 200 of the leading U.S. research universities and laboratories using the Abilene network to meet their advanced networking requirements, we need a platform that provides support for scalable, high-performance Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), multicast and gigabit-per-second unicast flows,” said Steve Corbato, director of backbone network infrastructure for Internet2. “Our stringent testing concluded that the Juniper Networks T640 platform best meets our needs today and provides us with the cost-effective scalability we will need to meet our aggressive future requirements.”
