Juniper adds new dimension to router front

After a successful performance in the core routing space, Juniper is now eyeing the edge of service provider networks. It is also looking at the Model for Integrated Network Transformation (MINT), which allows disparate networks to converge on a single network. Rahul Neel Mani has the details on Juniper’s plans

With Juniper’s 10 G-enabled multi-service edge platform users can move on to the newer emerging Layer 2/3 services in the future, says Giridhar Java

JUNIPER Networks, a company threatening Cisco’s monopoly and a powerful competitor to others in the core routing space, is looking beyond core now. Until recently, Juniper was perceived as just a core routing company where, in the last one year, it has grown by nearly 30 percent, with market share increasing from 16 to 21 percent. In the last quarter alone the company has grown from 18 percent to 22 percent, registering a smart 25 percent growth, whereas other legacy network equipment vendors have actually seen sales falling.

Juniper is now gearing up to capture the edge of service provider networks. The company unveiled an edge router called M320, designed to meld Layer 2 services (such as Frame Relay and ATM) with an IP/MPLS backbone. Along with the router, it also rolled out a software toolkit to allow service providers to write applications for Frame Relay and ATM service emulation. The toolkit, called J-FASE, also fosters interoperability with Lucent’s Frame Relay and ATM switches (Juniper and Lucent have an alliance centered around migrating Lucent’s installed base of Frame Relay and ATM customers to MPLS cores). The M320 Multiservice Edge Platform is designed to consolidate points of presence (PoPs) by replacing legacy routers. This new router now pushes Juniper’s two-year-old M40e edge router further down into smaller PoPs.

M320: Juniper’s bet for the edge

The M320 incorporates a new routing engine, the 1.6 GHz/2 G DRAM RE1600, which is designed to support thousands of VPNs and customer interfaces. The router features a forwarding rate of 385 M packet/sec and a switching capacity of 320 G bit/sec. Interface densities are 16xOC-192, 16x10 G Ethernet, 64xOC-48, 128xOC-3/12, 160x1 G bit/sec Ethernet and thousands of DS-1s, DS-0s and logical interfaces. The M320 also supports eight queues per logical interface for Quality of Service (QoS). The M320 supports Metro Ethernet services like VPLS, per-VLAN QoS and stacked VLANs, as well as translational cross-connect, a Juniper-developed feature for ATM/frame relay-to-Ethernet interworking.

The J-FASE includes capabilities such as DiffServ-aware MPLS traffic engineering and connection admission control for guaranteed bandwidth across IP/MPLS networks. It also includes operations, administration and maintenance tools to enable providers to assure service-level agreements.

Giridhar Java, country manager, India & SAARC, Juniper, says that the company already had a suite of M-Series products. After listening to customer feedback, it felt that there were islands of networks for multiple layers of services that a service provider (SP) markets. Each time a SP thinks of a new service/revenue stream, it has to build a new network infrastructure and add another layer over the old one. “It results in very high capital expenditure (capex), and because of multiple boxes and platforms, the manageability of the infrastructure becomes a big issue. This results in increased operational expenditure (opex),” says Java. Juniper started off with the M-Series to allow for various avenues on a single platform which was based on IP/MPLS, and then moved to the MINT (Model for Integrated Network Transformation) philosophy, which further allows for these revenues to turn into profits.

M320 Multiservice Edge router is trying to connect the POPs by replacing legacy routers. It pushes its own legacy M40e series edge routers into the smaller PoPs. Java explains how it happens. “If a SP has invested in STM16 ports and a Gigabit Ethernet box and has positioned one box for every network, then there are several such networks within one SP network, resulting in scaling hassles. Even if it scales, performance is impacted,” he says. When the SP moves up to the next step, should he essentially keep investing in newer networks thus creating multiple capex? What is the solution? “The M320 is the convergence point for all technologies. The SP moves into a single infrastructure environment that allows you on to the big box through an IP-based MPLS function. There can be tremendous reduction in investments made in multiplying networks/numbers of boxes,” Java explains. This allows disparate networks to converge on a single network. Having said that, what is also important is security, performance and scalability. There should be no degradation in performance when you have to scale up the network. In case of a M320, it has been further enhanced with a new 1600 Routing Engine (RE) based on the IP2 ASCIS, including the M40E. When you are pushing M320 on the edge for supporting multiple services, then you can put M40E further down the network where it can be best utilised.

M320 provides a separation of forwarding plane from the control plane. It can provide eight times the capacity in forwarding plane that an M40e could give, and 2.5 times the control plane capacity of M40e. “Juniper has the industry’s most reliable, scalable, 10 G-enabled multi-service edge platform. It is a strategic investment so that you can move on to the newer emerging Layer 2/3 services in future,” says Java. There are more than six Layer 2 services that service providers can carry today, but with time there will be many more services. Services like VPLS, IPv4/IPv6 etc, will become quite prevalent. “That’s where we are talking about, not just pushing boxes but to protect investment with more services. All this while we have been stressing on service reliability and protection, now we are talking of service protection,” says Java. Juniper’s M320 allows for a greater level of service protection because of its support for current and emerging Layer2/3 IP/MPLS-based VPN services.

M7i & M10i vs Cisco

Last November, Juniper also unveiled two edge routers designed to unseat older routers from arch-rival Cisco that are already installed in service provider networks.

Called the M7i and M10i, these routing platforms are targeted at small and midsize PoPs, campus networks and managed service environments that might be straining the performance and feature limits of Cisco’s 7200 and 7500 series of routing platforms. Juniper claims that the new routers let service providers turn up any feature or service without compromising performance; the company contends that Cisco routers can’t offer the same. At four slots and two rack units, the M7i chassis is Juniper’s most compact M-series router. It features integrated ASIC-based J-Protect security, which includes network address translation, Stateful Firewall, IP Security and J-Flow accounting.

The M7i, supporting 16 million packets/sec performance, can serve as a provider edge router in small PoPs and customer premises equipment systems for managed services and campus border router applications.

Juniper claims that Cisco’s upgrade to the 7500—the 7600 Optical Services Router—also suffers from a service/performance compromise, and is missing some key MPLS Provider Edge functions. The company is hopeful that service providers will either yank out their 7200s and 7500s or push them down the network for the new Juniper routers even though the rest of their infrastructure is Cisco-based. Java admits that 6-8 months ago Juniper was present in just 9-10 of the top 25 service provider networks of the world. But as of date, Juniper is in 24 of them. Those service providers were then having nothing but legacy equipment. So what happened to that? “The whole point is that people don’t replace infrastructure but push it down the line. People push it towards the edge and subsequently towards access,” says Java. “When customers saw that they could take more value-added services to the market, they positioned the infrastructure at the top with Juniper making it a core routing company interoperating with other network equipment. But when the company launched the Junos and the M Series, the new architecture-based routers, we were destined to become the edge router company,” states Java.

Although it’s not a common occurrence for service providers to replace Cisco routers with Juniper platforms, the market is very unpredictable. And surely, dislodging Cisco will prove very tough for Juniper. Service providers, looking for a raw bandwidth boost might be inclined to evaluate the Juniper routers as replacements for the Cisco platforms. But the edge is where feature-rich services are defined and tuned. It’s also where service providers make their money.

Infranet will be the decisive battle “Resulting out of MINT model, Juniper has now started talking about the ‘Infranet’

initiative. The Infranet initiative seeks to develop two interfaces—a user-to-network interface between customers and service providers and a so-called inter-carrier interface between service providers that adheres to a set of interconnection standards that establish a “lowest common denominator” required for implementation.

“Infranet is not just about a standard or proprietary technology talked about by Juniper. It’s a call to action by industry vendors and service providers to come together and provide a similar experience,” says Java. It endeavours to build ‘user-to-network’ and ‘network-to-network’ interfaces just like inter-carrier exchanges between service providers. “It should enable any service provider to seamlessly carry voice/video/data with the service level agreement (SLA) that has been signed between any vendor with any user. It’s just like the roaming service for mobile service users. This inter-carrier agreement would become the Infranet,” explains Java.

But this is not a breakthrough initiative by Juniper alone. It has been talked about in past by other vendors too, but nothing much happened about it. Juniper argues that the technology is here now; what’s missing is collaboration in the industry on how best to implement it to achieve this application-aware, service-granular Infranet. Current peering relationships between service providers and service-level contracts between customers and service providers fall short of the Infranet initiative goal because service assurances cannot be guaranteed across peering arrangements and certain types of traffic cannot be granted a greater level of treatment. “What Juniper is proposing is ‘selectively open’ connections between carriers, defined by common standards such as MPLS, Resource Reservation Protocol and the Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol, that support and reward the delivery of advanced services, such as content distribution and virtual private networks globally, vs a carrier’s own physical network,” says Java.

Juniper hasn’t provided a timeframe for completion of the Infranet initiative. Juniper is already working with vendors like Lucent and Microsoft and many others to help it reach its objective. But some analysts call it just a vendor-motivated initiative that ends up selling proprietary network framework. But Juniper refutes the charges. The company says that had it been a Juniper-centric development, there was no reason why companies like Lucent, Microsoft and Global Crossing would take part? “It’s slow to catch on. It will take time for people to take it but things are surely moving. Infranet initiative will be completed in three phases. The first phase is to build the platform infrastructure to carry the traffic. The second phase will be the controls, policies and management. The third phase will be to build the user-to-network and network-to-network interfaces. The first phase is currently on,” says Java.

rahul@expresscomputeronline.com