Juniper scales down next-gen core
T320 designed for smaller 10G entry points.
 
|
|||
 | |||
|
Juniper's T320 router is the second in a series of products based on the company's 10G bit/sec-optimized T-series silicon. The first was the T640, a terabit-scale core router that debuted in the spring.
The T320 router allows network service providers and carriers to deploy Juniper's new platform to meet immediate requirements and as a migration vehicle to high-density, higher-speed 10G bit/sec interfaces. Critics said the T640 was ahead of the market for a core that is experiencing a glut of bandwidth and is undersubscribed with traffic.
Advertisement: |
Nonetheless, Juniper says it has 10 customers using the T640 in production networks, up from the four it divulged in April. It also says the T640 has a five- to seven-year life span vs. competitive offerings that require a refresh at least every three years, according to Juniper.
But while the T640 is designed specifically for the "deep" core, the T320 is intended to be a more versatile iteration of the high-speed, high-density technology. The T320 is designed for smaller service provider sites needing an entry point into dense 10G bit/sec applications, Juniper says.
Verio is using both the T320 and T640 routers. The T320 is being used for core aggregation in "second tier" cities, and as a lower-power, smaller-footprint alternative for 10G bit/sec routing, says Peter Schoenmaker, IP network development engineer at Verio.
"We're using it as an aggregation point from our edge devices, where it's then transported on our global network," Schoenmaker says. "We use it in the same application (as the T640), just in different locations. The space and power requirements are significantly less than the T640, so we can deploy 10G bit/sec interfaces at locations where we may not necessarily have the space or power to deploy a T640."
The T320 rollout mimics Cisco's introduction of the 124XX series routers last fall, in which it sought to offer 10G bit/sec trunking in small, medium and large forms for points-of-presence of corresponding sizes.
However, the T320 may have a density advantage over the Cisco routers. The Juniper box occupies one-third of a telco equipment rack. Its eight slots in the T320 house so-called "flexible PIC concentrators (FPC)," processing engines for physical interface cards (PIC). Each FPC holds two PICs; in the T640, each FPC supports four PICs.
The router supports a number of lower speed PICs - OC-3 and OC-12 SONET and ATM, and Gigabit Ethernet, among them - as well as up to 16 OC-192c/10G bit/sec Ethernet, and 64 OC-48c/STM-16 PICs per chassis. Juniper claims the T320 triples the per-rack 2.5G and 10G bit/sec density of Cisco's 124XX series of Internet routers.
The T320 features 320G bit/sec of throughput, Juniper claims, and forwarding performance of 385 million 40-byte packet/sec.
The T320 allows service providers and carriers to deploy dense OC-3 ATM, SONET/SDH aggregation to provide, for example, transport of ATM and frame relay customer traffic over IP/Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) backbones, Juniper says. It also supports dense Gigabit Ethernet aggregation for Metro Ethernet and hosting applications.
Indeed, the T320 was conceived and developed to assist network service providers investing in the transition from ATM and frame relay service revenue to IP service revenue, Juniper says. Currently, however, IP service revenue and profit have proved elusive, which has extended the life of ATM and frame relay and even given birth to start-up companies developing next-generation ATM/frame relay platforms.
Other applications for the router include dense OC-192 and OC-48 peering between service providers; aggregation of T-1, DSL and Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol connections from downstream Unisphere ERX edge routers (Juniper recently acquired Unisphere); and as a routing node for wholesale carrier applications, such as MPLS-based Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPNs.
Verio has MPLS traffic engineering on its T320 backbone but is "not comfortable" deploying MPLS-based VPN services, Schoenmaker says. "The T320s will not be doing any (MPLS) VPNs," he says. "MPLS VPNs require that you have multiple routing and forwarding tables. There's a lot less overhead doing MPLS traffic engineering compared to MPLS VPNs."
Verio will also be looking at supporting Layer 2 services - ATM, frame relay and Ethernet - across the T320 IP/MPLS backbone as it converges some of its multiple networks, Schoenmaker says.
The T320 also serves as a tributary node into the T640 and the TX matrix technology for linking multiple T640s into a terabit-scale routing core.
The T320 uses the same JUNOS operating system software currently running across all Juniper M-series platforms, and the T640. This commonality on software facilitates feature and performance consistency, Juniper says. Also, some interfaces are forward compatible from the M-160 up to the T320, and then up to the T640, the company says.
"I think it completes their router portfolio very well," says Mark Bieberich, an analyst at The Yankee Group. "There's a pretty sizable gap between the M160 and the T640. For those providers that might not need the full capacity of the T640, the T320 is a good fit. It's a nice entry point for a high capacity platform."
The T320 may cannibalize some sales from the M160 - which has 10G bit/sec packet ordering challenges - but Juniper says it has no plans to end-of-life any M series routers based on the introduction of the T320.
RELATED LINKS
 |
 |
 |
|||||
|
 |
|
|
|
|||
