Forget what you know (or perhaps you don’t know) about routing products from Juniper Networks .
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based networking product maker Tuesday said the latest addition to its T-series routing family, the Juniper Networks T320 Router is better than anything put out by rival Cisco Systems .
The company recently unveiled its new T-series Internet routing family as an alternative to Cisco’s higher priced products.
But its main draw may be that it has the capacity for dense 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) routing. The IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) Standards Board and the 10 Gigabit Ethernet Alliance (10GEA) recently adopted 10 Gigabit Ethernet as a 802.3ae specification.
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 at a cheaper price. The company has designs on marketing the T320 to network service providers and carriers who want to roll out 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
“To complement our existing T640 implementation, we wanted a flexible platform that could deliver high densities in a smaller form factor while allowing for interface expansion to dense 10 Gigabits to meet our customers’ evolving needs. The T320 met these criteria, while also providing highly efficient power consumption,” commented Mitch Ferro, vice president, Product Management for Verio’s Broadband Services business unit.
Juniper said the new router allows for ultra-dense OC-3 ATM, SONET/SDH aggregation to provide, for example, transport of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), and Frame Relay (FR) customer traffic over MPLS, which is becoming a necessity for Metro Ethernet and hosting applications.
The T320 router also sports 16 OC-192c/STM-64 ports in a chassis and also supports dense OC-48 and 10 Gigabit core applications and will use the same JUNOS software that is common across all Juniper Networks M- and T-series platforms.
Positioned as a high-speed, unifying technology for networking applications in LANs, MANs, and WANs, 10GEA said the benefits of 10 Gigabit Ethernet is to provide simple, high bandwidth at relatively low cost.
For example, in LAN applications, 10 Gigabit Ethernet could let organizations scale their packet-based networks from 10 Mbps to 10,000 Mbps. In MAN and WAN applications, 10 Gigabit Ethernet has the power to let service providers and others to create extremely high-speed longer distance Ethernet links at very competitive cost.
Recently, Juniper has experienced growth in a market where Cisco trims most competitors. In May 2002, Juniper went out and purchased Unisphere for $740 million in stock and cash. However Juniper must make up lost ground. A recent Dell’Oro Group survey found Cisco’s lead topping the $1.2 million market share list with Juniper slipping.
The new 10 Gigabit Ethernet capabilities are expected to help bolster Juniper’s attempts to unseat Cisco in the space.
Riverstone Networks and Nortel Networks
are also competing for market share in this arena.
