Comparison of Routers Cisco, Juniper and Huawei

# Cisco, Juniper and Huawei Router comparison
# CCIE Candidates only
# MPLS requirement routers- High end Routers
# High Back-plane capacity and high port capacity
#Used as Core routers in the MPLS environment
# Cisco 9922- Capacity till 11 Tbps
# Juniper MX2020- Capacity till 80 Tbps
# Huawei NE5000E- Capacity till 6.4 Tbps

So below are the comparison between the various high end models in the market with the high capacity till in Tbps.

These kind of routers are basically used in the Service providers core. so we have many service providers who are providing MPLS, Internet services to the clients.

Service providers like AT&T, BT, Orange, NTT Communications, Verizon, Telefonica, TATA and so on used these kinds of routers in their core networks for high back-plane capacity.

Various features are supported by these kinds of routers like Multi-chassis ether-channel, Non-stop Forwarding, MPLS-TRR, Non-stop routing and various high end features.

Lets discuss the comparison in details as follows:-

Cisco firm will be presented by router Cisco ASR 9922. Given product backs up capacity 11 Tbps and this way it is the most productive product of ASR series.

For comparison in given article firm Juniper presents a model Juniper MX2020, which backs up carrying capacity from 34.4 to 80 Tbps.MX2020 supports a very high density 10GbE, 40GbE and 100GbE, interfaces, and also obsolete methods of connection SONET/SDH, ATM and PDH. It also supports subscribers’ management with wide-band connection, modern opportunities of time synchronizing and virtualization, which meet strict demands of mobile services.
Due to scalable in industry-leading set of opportunities the router MX2020 ideally suited for boarders and consolidated borders and net core and application cores as well.


Huawei represents model Huawei NE5000E. This very model in 2008 afforded the firm Huawei show itself to be arch-rival in the area of Internet backbone.NE5000E presents multi-level protection from the device to the network. For protection on the devices level, NE5000E contains passive plane where all key components of the device are switched in “hot-pluggable” and posses a function of hot back up. The solution contains nonstop address modification (NSF) on the basis of states and hot-swappable and nonstop routing (NSR) on the panel level and on the processes level in all scenario.

Juniper Unveils New Routers for Mobile Networks

The devices, as well as new capabilities in the Junos Space management platform, aim to help carriers improve bandwidth and create new services.

Juniper Networks is rolling out new networking routers and features in its Junos Space network management software to help out mobile service providers that are under pressure to supply more bandwidth and more quickly spin out new services to customers.

Juniper officials on Feb. 18 unveiled the new ACX500 and ACX5000 routers, which offer such capabilities as improved accuracy in detecting signal hand-offs, improved routing of small cell signals, embedded virtualized functions and the aggregation of multiple networks, from small cells and macro cells to residential and commercial broadband networks.

New features in the Junos Connectivity Services Director and Cross Provisioning Platform software enable the automated provisioning and unified management of Carrier Ethernet services on multivendor networks, which essentially reduces the amount of time spent deploying services and decreases the overall cost of operation, according to Juniper officials.

The new offerings come as mobile service providers are being pushed to supply greater network bandwidth and to more quickly provision services for their customers. They are addressing those demands to some degree with small cells, which can be used to deliver greater bandwidth and faster services. However, the use of these devices creates the need to better aggregate them and make management easier via a stronger backhaul, officials said.

uniper is looking to enable service providers to create better back hauls for small cells and improved Ethernet deployments through the integration of both the physical infrastructure and virtual services, according to Mike Marcellin, senior vice president of marketing and strategy at Juniper.

"These new solutions enhance the mobile subscriber experience and improve profit margins for service providers by cost-effectively meeting operational challenges with zero-touch rapid deployment and delivering seamless access for new, high-bandwidth services," Marcellin said in a statement.

The ACX500 is designed to reduce capacity issues that are arising with the increasingly complex LTE networks. At the same time, the router comes with an integrated GPS receiver, which officials said will reduce the number of dropped calls and improve locations-based services, such as directions and E911 emergency calls. In addition, the router's capabilities will improve the quality of video streaming, Juniper officials said. Small cell routing will be improved via integrated security and high-precision timing with less than 0.5-microsecond phase accuracy, they said.

The router, which will be available in the second quarter, has no fans and is rugged enough to be used indoors or outside.

"The ACX500 routers also support Juniper Networks Junos OS, extensive Layer 2 and Layer 3 features, IP/MPLS with traffic engineering support, rich network management, fault management, service monitoring and OAM capabilities," a Juniper blogger noted in a post on the company site. "By converging all of these features into a single device, the ACX500 line of routers delivers a level of scalability and reliability that will improve your customers' overall quality of experience while lowering costs for deploying, maintaining and updating the network infrastructure."

The ACX5000, which will be available this quarter, is a dense, terabit-scale Carrier Ethernet router that can aggregate multiple networks. It offers Gigabit Ethernet, 10GbE and 40GbE capabilities as well as offering carriers an efficient Metro Ethernet platform that will help cut operating expenses.

The router supports Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM)-compliant network-functions virtualization (NFV) that enables carriers to quickly create such services as network analytics and security services, as well as virtualized network functions that are customized for subscribers.

Cisco Complexity VS Juniper Simplicity

An Open Letter to Juniper’s New (Again!) CEO

From the first, Juniper has had perhaps the strongest hardware technology of any network vendor.  For a time, in the middle if the last decade, it also had some of the best marketing.  Then things turned for Juniper.  It brought in a CEO from Microsoft, a CEO who was supposed to take the company into the new age of software.  He didn’t.  They then got an activist investor who pressured for increased shareholder value.  A new CEO came in, one who seemed focused on spending the company’s cash to prop up share price.  Now, that CEO is gone too, after only about a year.  A new CEO from inside was named, Rami Rahim.  The obvious question is “Can he turn things around?”

The plus side is that Rami is a Juniper insider, a person who knows the company’s culture, people, and strength.  He headed R&D and was involved in Juniper’s seminal MX router.  You also might assume that getting a product guy into the role is a signal that the Juniper Board is changing its own course, and trying to build a future and not mortgage one.

The minus side is that Rami is an insider, perhaps too rooted in the boxes-and-chips mindset that was great a decade ago but that has now run its course.  The future of networking is software, and can a hardware guy preside over a spurt of software innovation?  Maybe, if he does the right thing.  What might that be?  Not being one to hold back on advice, let me give some (unsolicited) to Rami.

First and foremost, you have to create a solid story in SDN and NFV.  Not the anemic me-too stuff you have now, but something that will address what the operators really need to get from both technologies.  SDN and NFV stands or falls on software above the traditional network hardware–above the network in fact.  There’s a lot of open-source stuff out there that could be harnessed to tell a more complete story in service and network operations, orchestration, and management.  You need to get it, and tell that story.  You’ll have to fight your own roots, some old friends, and maybe even some old bosses to do this.  It’s necessary.

Second, you need to inspire your own company.  Juniper has had years of bad management at the top, and you’re suffering a major hemorrhage of human capital, the very mobile, industry-aware people you can’t afford to lose.  Most of them don’t want to go, but they don’t see a choice.  Give them one, and show them which choice is the right one.

Third, you have to inspire the Street.  Your predecessor wasn’t my kind of guy, but his biggest problem was that he was dancing to the Street’s tune.  Some of the problem is likely your own board; who hired your last (bad) pair in the first place?  Some of the problem is the “activist investor’.  You need to avoid having costs run away while you’re establishing your software credentials, but you also need to present a compelling vision of the network of the future and Juniper’s place in it to Wall Street.  Juniper needs to be a growth company to keep the sharks off your neck.  Show them how that comes about.  Otherwise they’ll just push you out too.

Fourth, you have to harness hardware and not let it drive the bus.  Hardware, in the IT world, is something you run software on.  We’re heading there in networking, but unlike the IT world there’s still a big opportunity to define just what it takes to run network software.  Juniper has done some great work in ASICS and done some lousy positioning of that work.  Mostly because it wanted the chip to be the center of the universe.  Make it a tool, the thing that can make your software better.

Fifth, harness your visions.  Juniper has been out in front of a lot of important developments.  Juniper talked about what became the cloud before anyone else.  They talked about proto-SDN and proto-NFV.  They then let all of that leadership go to waste.  Juniper had a separate chassis for an expanded control plane; it’s gone.  They had a global initiative to modernize service creation and deployment, one that actually had a better foundation than either SDN or NFV.  It’s gone too.  It may be too late to turn back the clock, but it’s darn sure not too late to turn back the practice of turning away.

Sixth, get your marketing mojo back.  Your positioning has been insipid for years now.  You can’t educate a marketplace, you have to inspire it.  You can’t spend cycles and money buying favorable opinions of yourself and your products; the customer sees through all this stuff.  The press will never sell your product.  analysts won’t sell it either.  YOU have to sell it, using those other channels to connect to your buyer, not to carry your message.   Your PR is awful, your website is awful.  But fixing both is a wave of the hand for you now.  Wave.

Finally, lead.  This is no time to build consensus, to seek opinions.  Be sensitive to their ideas, respect their views, but lead.  You need to get Juniper moving very quickly because they have sunk a very long way and there’s not much time left.  That time has been given to you.  Use it wisely and you’ll be remembered as the guy who made Juniper great again.

Juniper’s MX Router Goes Virtual

Juniper is virtualizing its MX routers and adding more cloud punch around its Junos operating system.

Today’s announcement of the vMX 3D Universal Edge Router will eventually put Juniper on the map in terms of having a virtual router to compete with Brocade‘s Vyatta line and Cisco‘s Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000v. The vMX is due to be available in the first quarter.

Juniper is also introducing a turnkey network functions virtualization (NFV) platform called Contrail Cloud, consisting of a pre-configured cloud in a rack. Finally, Junos is giving a nod to the DevOps crowd by infusing Junos with functionality for tools such as Puppet and Chef.

All these moves are aimed at helping Juniper do what all the other vendors are doing: trying to keep up with the new and more fluid types of networking that are emerging, typified by software-defined networking (SDN). While Juniper is far from alone in that goal, it’s has had the added distraction of a corporate makeover initiated by CEO Shaygan Kheradpir, one that’s apparently not done yet.

Like Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent, Juniper prides itself on using ASICs at the heart of its routers — and is being forced to concede to the increasingly virtual nature of networking. Juniper recompiled the code that normally runs on the Trio chipset (the ASICs at the heart of the MX router line), optimizing it for an x86 host.

The result is a virtual router with all of the MX’s functionality, Juniper says. What’s gained is the ability to provision the router quickly because it’s virtual. What’s missing is the high performance of a hardware MX — which is why Juniper and the others will continue to argue that they need ASICs at the heart of their newest, biggest routers.

Juniper’s virtual-router entry is arriving relatively late, but the company hopes its heavy presence among service providers can compensate for that. The MX and the Trio chipset are already qualified for carrier networks, as is Junos, so it could be a simpler step to get the vMX qualified. “The testing will be more surgical than broad-sweep,” says Stephen Liu, Juniper’s senior director of service provider marketing.

Juniper also had some service-provider backing. AT&T started helping develop the vMX “over a year ago,” Liu says. Not coincidentally, Juniper has been qualified as a Domain 2.0 vendor for AT&T’s User-Defined Network Cloud.

The cost of a vMX license will vary depending on performance, which can be chosen in increments as low as 100 Mb/s. Juniper says it’s gotten a vMX to run at 160 Gb/s using multiple Intel CPU cores (details weren’t immediately available). For the moment, that would exceed the 80 Gb/s that Brocade is claiming out of its Vyatta virtual routers.

Something tells me we’re going to see those numbers ratchet upward as vendors try to one-up each other. But then again, virtual routers start getting unwieldy if you’re shooting for performance that’s too high. About 160 Gb/s is “where the economics start to peter out,” Liu says.

On Cloud and DevOps

Contrail Cloud is a turnkey platform for cloud computing, incorporating Juniper’s Contral SDN controller and third-party compute and storage elements. The whole thing can be orchestrated by Juniper’s own OpenStack distribution, although Juniper will also let customers pick other distributions.

Juniper has also partnered with Amdocs to integrate Contrail Cloud into service providers’ back-end systems.

As for the DevOps piece: Junos now includes client agents for Chef and Puppet. These bits of software are necessary for Chef or Puppet to talk to the device being managed or provisioned.

This makes Junos Chef- or Puppet-ready, which in turn should make it easier for IT staffers to tinker with the network. Until now, that’s been the purview of networking and IP experts. “What we’ve done now is make the IP layer bilingual,” Liu says.

Juniper is also introducing Junos Continuity, a feature that lets Juniper introduce new hardware features without forcing a revision to Junos. Liu describes it as a matter of making Junos more modular.

Juniper's Latest SDN Offerings Cater To Service Providers

Juniper Networks announced the expansion of its software defined networking (SDN) program with new hardware and software designed to help communication service providers (CSPs) accelerate service creation and network utilization. The products and services announced at the Mobile World Congress yesterday are also designed to help carriers reduce both capital expenditure and operational spending.

Due to a flood of data from cloud computing, mobile and internet connected devices, and high definition video streaming, CSPs are struggling to stay profitable and are looking for ways to lower operational costs.

Juniper Networks will expand on its SDN portfolio to help service providers build high-IQ networks and cloud environments. The networks are designed to be secure, automated, and scalable, enabling rapid provisioning based on actionable intelligence. The solutions from Juniper would also help carriers address future needs as additional traffic demands increase.

Juniper is offering Juno Fusion, an automation tool designed to control thousands of both Juniper and independent network elements from a single management plane. According to Juniper, this software will reduce network complexity and operational costs by collapsing the underlying transport elements (microwave, mobile, optical, etc.) into a single point of control from the Juniper Networks MX Series or PTX Series routing platform. Junos Fusion will be available in the second quarter of 2014.

Juniper is also unveiling its Juniper Networks NorthStar Controller that will leverage open industry standard protocols. Based on operator defined performance and cost requirements, the NorthStar Controller will automate the process of identifying and programming optimal paths within multi-vendor networks. Service providers will avoid over provisioning and better support mobile and cloud traffic.

The NorthStar Controller integrates WANDL technology and includes intelligent analytics and modeling capabilities to enhance the performance and cost-effectiveness of an operator's network infrastructure.

Juniper is also introducing a 1TB line card adding further scale to the PTX series router. The new line card doubles the PTX router's per-slot capacity to provide operators with more usable per-path bandwidth. This card will be available in the second quarter of 2014.

To create value for CSPs, providers can use the new Junos Video Focus, Junos Subscriber Aware, Junos Application Aware and Junos Policy Control products available on the MX Series routers and allow operators to use the MX in the Gi-LAN as a Service Control Gateway (SCG). This will allow service providers to customize services based on both who is using the network as well as what they are using it for. The SCG functions will be available in mid-2014.

Juniper Networks will provide professional service to help customers move to these highly customizable networks. No information was provided regarding the cost of the new products.

Investor To Juniper: 7 Changes You Should Make Right Now

An Investor's Call To Action

On Jan. 13, one day before Juniper Networks kicked off its third annual Global Partner Conference in Las Vegas, hedge fund and Juniper Investor Elliott Management filed a report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That report, at its most basic level, called for Juniper to make some serious changes -- and soon.

 

Elliott Management, which holds a 6.2 percent investment stake in Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Juniper, outlined several steps Juniper should take to reduce operating expenses, streamline its product portfolio, and, overall, become a leaner, better version of itself. "Our conclusion from [our] analysis is that Juniper's assets are valuable and strategic and that the business possesses several fundamental upside drivers over the medium-term but that its future will be increasingly difficult if Juniper continues with its existing strategy," Elliott Management wrote in a PDF presentation accompanying the SEC filing.

 

Here are 7 steps Elliot Management said Juniper should take now to put it "back on the path towards

success."

 

Take A Serious Look At Security

As Elliott Management sees it, Juniper needs to make some serious decisions regarding its security strategy. As a whole, Juniper's security story is one beset with "missteps and distractions," Elliot Management wrote, not the least of which was Juniper's "mis-executed" product transition away from its legacy NetScreen products. The investment firm also said the recent exit of Bob Muglia, executive vice president, Software Solutions Division, spells more bad news for Juniper's security business. "Juniper's board should undertake a strategic review of the security business, which is underperforming and now lacks a leader after Bob Muglia's recent resignation," the filing read.

 

Juniper admits that its security business has been a pain point. In 2010 and 2011, it faced significant backlash from partners and customers, who felt it was too slow to respond to customer complaints about its flawed SRX services gateways. "Given the security business' underperformance and dilution to Juniper's year-over-year growth profile, [Wall] Street analysts have repeatedly asked management if the business can be divested or de-emphasized," Elliott

 

Enterprise Switching, QFabric Need Attention, Too

Juniper's security strategy isn't the only one that needs to be shaken up a bit, Elliott Management urged.

 

Juniper's enterprise switching line -- and, especially, its QFabric data center fabric -- needs to be revisited, Elliott Management said, particularly as Juniper's overall switching share continues to sit at about 3 percent in a market "dominated by Cisco."

 

According to Elliott's report, Juniper has "overpromised and underdelivered" on the development and sales of QFabric, a product it spent two years and more than $100 million to make. The delayed launch of QFabric also gave Juniper competitors, including Cisco, Brocade and Arista, ample time to roll out their own data center fabric offerings, Elliott said.

 

"QFabric fell under scrutiny as a product that had failed to live up to its initial hype," the PDF reads.

 

Hold Off On M&As

According to Elliott Management, Juniper should pump the breaks when it comes to acquisitions -- especially if it wants to cut costs.

 

The investment firm said Juniper has spent over $7 billion on acquisitions since 1999, amounting to 111 percent of Juniper's overall enterprise value at the time Elliott began to "buy material amounts" of Juniper stock. That kind of spending needs to stop, according to the firm.

 

"Juniper should give strong consideration to halting its acquisition program while it focuses on execution in its existing businesses," the report said.

 

Elliott Management also slapped Juniper on the wrist for having moved forward with acquisitions in December (when it bought WANDL, a maker of network analysis and management software, for $60 million), especially with a new CEO starting in just two weeks, and Muglia having just left.

 

Cost-Cutting Is A Must

Elliott Management is urging Juniper to reduce its operating expenses by $200 million in 2014, a goal it said Juniper can achieve by focusing more on its "main business" and eliminating "lower risk-adjusted ROI projects."

 

Investors at Elliott said a $200 million reduction in operating expenses alone could increase Juniper's stock price between 24 percent and 41 percent, putting it somewhere between $28 and $32.

 

"Realization of a clearly articulated and meaningful cost savings plan can restore confidence in Juniper by communicating that the Company is prudently reducing spend while making targeted investments in an effort to maximize shareholder value," Elliott wrote in the PDF.

 

Ease Up On R&D Spend

Elliott Management called Juniper's R&D spend "excessive" compared to competitors like Cisco, HP and Riverbed, and urged the company to scale back on R&D investments as part of an overall cost-cutting plan.

 

"Juniper's R&D spend is significantly higher than its peers relative to revenue and per R&D employee, representing a significant source of savings as part of the recommended cost realignment plan," the PDF said. Elliott's analysis shows that Juniper spends roughly 27 percent more on its R&D employees compared to its competitors. If Juniper spent at the "average level" of its rivals, the investment firm said Juniper could save roughly $200 million each year.

 

Elliott's report also shows that Juniper's R&D spend represented roughly 21 percent of its overall revenue for the past 12 months. Cisco was the next biggest spender at 16 percent. Elliott said Juniper has invested more than $7.7 billion in R&D since its founding.

 

Stop Paying Engineers So Much

Not only does Juniper spend too much on its R&D employees -- it spends too much on its software engineers, too, according to Elliott Management.

 

The PDF said that Juniper pays the highest average base salary to its software engineers compared to its competitors, many of which, Elliott pointed out, have larger revenue bases and market caps.

 

Citing 2013 data from Glassdoor.com, Elliott said in the filing that Juniper spends more on its software engineers than tech giants, including Facebook, Google, Amazon and Yahoo. It also spends more than direct competitors, including Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Brocade and Arista. The average base salary for a Juniper software engineer, according to the report, is somewhere around $159,990. LinkedIn is next in line with $136,427.

 

Cisco, the PDF stated, pays its software engineers an average base salary of $109,491.

 

 

Make A Comeback In Service Provider Routing

Elliott Management was blunt in its PDF about Juniper losing "significant market share" in the service providing routing market -- but not all is lost yet, according to the firm.

 

As Elliott sees it, if Juniper can refocus on its main service provider routing marketing by eliminating the "distraction" caused by its nonrouting R&D projects and "failed efforts" in security and switching, the company could potentially regain the 6 points in market share it's lost in the edge router market since 2005. What's more, Elliott said Juniper could regain the 12 points it's lost in the core routing market since 2005 -- if, again, it can push those "distractions" aside.

 

According to Elliott's filing, which cited market share data from Infonetics, Juniper's market share in the service provider edge router market in 2005 was 20 percent, compared to 14 percent in 2012. In the service provider core router market, Juniper's market share in 2005 was 36 percent, compared to 24 percent in 2012.

 

Contrail: The Juniper SDN controller for virtual overlay network

Juniper Networks will launch a portfolio of software-defined networking products later this year under the brand name JunosV Contrail. The first Juniper SDN product -- available in the third quarter -- will be the Contrail Controller, which will initially provide centralized control for a virtual overlay network.

The Juniper SDN controller is based on technology Juniper acquired last year when it bought startup Contrail Systems. Today, JunosV Contrail Controller is an overlay network solution comparable to VMware NSX, Midokura MidoNet and Nuage Networks. The controller interacts with virtual switches on hypervisor hosts using Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) as its control plane protocol. Contrail Controller also uses Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for control plane scaling across LANs and WANs.

"XMPP offers lower overhead and higher performance," said Joe Skorupa, vice president and distinguished analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. "And they use BGP for federation across controllers."

The Contrail Controller doesn't support OpenFlow or any other protocols for direct control of network hardware, but Juniper didn't rule out future support. For now, Juniper is focusing on delivering a virtual overlay network.

"Most of the infrastructure that is out there today either doesn't have OpenFlow capabilities on it or will require some upgrade to get it, which means rip and replace," said Brad Brooks, Juniper vice president of marketing and strategy. "The protocols we're using with Contrail mean you can overlay software right on top of existing infrastructure and get benefits right away. It's not to say we won't support OpenFlow [in our controller]. If it becomes a de facto standard for how to communicate with the underlying physical network, then we can put that in support for the controller. But we're really looking at and focusing on standard protocols that already exist in physical networks today."

Juniper SDN eyes carriers and enterprises with scale, open APIs

Juniper Networks Inc. is angling JunosV Contrail at both carriers and enterprises, said Jennifer Lin, senior director of product management for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Juniper. Both are looking for "ways to drive better operational efficiency and ensure that the network is exposed as a service or set of services, and not just a siloed part of the infrastructure," she said.

To that end, Juniper is exposing a RESTful application programming interface (API), instantiating its own OpenStack Quantum plug-in, and announcing several partnerships geared toward integrating its SDN technology with leading cloud orchestration systems. It's partnering with Citrix on CloudStack integration and with Cloudscaling and Mirantis on OpenStack integration.

Contrail's scale-out control plane based on BGP will appeal to carriers, enterprises and cloud providers looking to federate controllers across the WAN.

"We're focused on how to get a scale-out control plane. … In this case, we're extending mature protocols like BGP, which run today's Internet, and linking together autonomous systems across IP networks," Lin said.

Juniper SDN will integrate overlay and underlay for diagnostics and analytics

Like other vendors who are enabling an SDN-like virtual overlay network, Juniper requires basic Layer 3 connectivity on the underlying physical network. Juniper hopes to differentiate itself from VMware and others by connecting the physical and virtual networks together.

"One difference between Juniper and VMware is that Juniper will link management of virtual and physical to enable debugging problems," Skorupa said. "Otherwise, figuring out if the [network] problem is in the overlay or the physical IP network is extremely difficult at best."

Juniper is working on bridging protocols like BGP and MPLS into its overlay network so JunosV Contrail can interact with Juniper's switches and routers to extract diagnostics and analytics from the physical network and combine it with the software overlay, Lin said. "We're able to correlate if something goes wrong in your pod," she said. "You have both the diagnostics of the virtual infrastructure as well as the physical underlay."

Integrating physical and overlay networks will be essential, according to Bob Laliberte, senior analyst with Milford, Mass.-based Enterprise Strategy Group.

"Just like you can't keep on provisioning virtual machines in physical servers without an understanding of what is going on (memory and CPU usage, etc.), these overlay networks need to understand what is going on in the physical infrastructure or underlay," he said.
 

First look: Juniper's core SDN switch

Juniper does not have a migration plan for current EX8200 users to EX9200 40/100G Ethernet/SDN switch

Earlier than expected, Juniper this week unveiled the EX9200 programmable core switch for 10G, 40G and 100Gbps software-defined networks.

The EX9200 is a complete core replacement for current generation EX8200 customers looking for 40/100G Ethernet and/or SDN programmability. None of the EX8200 line cards are forward compatible with the EX9200, Juniper says.

"(The upgrade) sounds drastic, but the EX8200 is successful in lower density markets," says Dhritiman Dasgupta, Juniper senior director or product marketing and strategy. "We did not have a solution for very high speed densities."

Juniper does not yet have an EX8200-to-EX9200 migration or trade-in program in place for customers but is working on one, Dasgupta says.

The EX9200 is based on Juniper's MX edge router rather than the EX switch. It runs that same 3+-year-old One/Trio ASIC as the MX and form factors are identical, but chassis, line cards, switch fabric, routing engines and software are not, Dasgupta says.

Only power supplies, fan trays, air filters and power cables are interchangeable components between the EX9200 and MX router, he says. New guts were necessary to bring the MX-based EX9200 down to a switch price point, he says - functionally-enriched routers cost much more than switches.

Juniper went with the MX technology instead of the EX switch platform for the EX9200 due to the programmability of the Trio ASIC, Dasgupta says.

"We would not have been able to deliver that" with the EX platform, he says.

He also claims that the EX8200 was never designed for 40/100G Ethernet despite the multi-terabit switch capacity numbers Juniper touted for the box. Nonetheless, customers may have been sold on the EX8200 with the understanding it was "100G Ready" -- Juniper resellers and channel partners are
being advised to reassure those customers that Juniper will continue to invest in and support the
EX8200, and aid in the migration to the EX9200, sources familiar with the program have said.

Dasgupta says the EX8200 will receive mostly software enhancements from here on in.

The EX9200 has also cast future development of the QFabric Interconnect, the core of Juniper's QFabric single-tier data center fabric switching system, into question. Sources say QFabric will remain Juniper's lead platform for single-tier fabrics but for "10G-only" implementations, despite the platform's support for currently shipping 40G interfaces.

The majority of QFabric top-of-rack switches - called "nodes" in the QFabric architecture - already have 40G uplinks, Dasgupta says.

QFabric will be positioned as the alternative to Cisco's Nexus 7000 with "F" series cards, which are optimized for high-density, low-power, shallow buffers and limited features, sources say. EX9200 will be positioned against the Nexus 7000 "M" series in the data center, and against Cisco's Catalyst 6500E and HP's 7500/10500/12500 switches in the campus core with large physical or logical scale, and/or 40/100G requirements, they say.

It is unclear what Juniper will position against Cisco's new Nexus 6000 40G data center switch but it's conceivable the EX9200, perhaps in combination with QFabric top-of-rack nodes, will take that on as well.

Dasgupta says Juniper is still committed to continued development of single-tier fabric architectures and that there's demand for the predictable low latency switching it's designed for. He says Juniper is signing up a couple of "full" QFabric - node and interconnect - customers per quarter.

"In 10 years, every data center will need an architecture like QFabric," Dasgupta says. "You will be able to sign your application performance SLAs in blood" with such an architecture.

He would not comment on whether 100G is planned for QFabric, but it appears it is still unclear if the QFabric Interconnect will attain it.

"I can't comment on when 100G [might emerge] for QFabric at the edge," Dasgupta said, apparently referring to the top-of-rack nodes. Juniper declined to clarify Dasgupta's remark.

If only QFabric top-of-rack nodes attain 100G, they will connect into an EX9200 core for two-tier data center networking, sources say. Juniper is positioning the EX9200 as the optimal platform for that, they say, in combination with the EX series and/or QFabric 1G/10G top-of-rack switches.
In addition to the EX9200, Juniper this week also unveiled a network management application for controlling mixed environments of wired and wireless LANs in campuses and data centers. Junos Space Network Director includes the RingMaster management application Juniper obtained from its acquisition of Trapeze Networks in 2010.

Network Director will work with a new virtualized wireless controller Juniper also rolled out this week. The JunosV Wireless LAN Controller is software that runs as a VM on x86 servers that's designed to abstract the underlying hardware appliance that provides wireless control services.

The JunosV WLC will be embedded in the EX9200 in about a year, Dasgupta says. From the core, it will be able to manage thousands of access points and tens of thousands of WLAN users, with high-availability, he says.

Juniper Breaking New Ground With the World's Smallest Supercore

More Details -
http://www.juniper.net/us/en/dm/ptx-3000/?utm_source=promo&utm_medium=home_page&utm_content=carousel&utm_campaign=ptx3000

Video
http://www.youtube.com/embed/HNXYUJsNz3A?rel=0&autohide=1&autoplay=1


Breaking New Ground With the World's Smallest Supercore

Space and energy are two key challenges faced by Service Providers as they converge and optimize their business. The PTX3000 Packet Transport Router breaks new ground with the world’s smallest supercore, with capacity that is designed to rapidly scale over time up to 24 terabits per second. With this innovation, Service Providers can now install a converged supercore in virtually any space and energy constrained environment. Plus, it is designed to rapidly scale with minimal power consumption.

Meet the latest innovation in the PTX line.



The PTX3000 breaks the mold for core routers with game-changing size, performance and efficiency, addressing practical barriers that Service Providers face in upgrading today’s networks. With the PTX3000, Juniper has redefined the upgrade so that one technician can manually hand-carry and install a PTX3000 within a matter of minutes versus hours.

When compared to competing core routing platforms, the PTX3000 router delivers:

• The industry’s lowest power consumption – up to 1.2Tbps per Kilowatt
• The industry’s most efficient system design - generating roughly 10,000 BTU of heat for a fully loaded system
• Leading capacity-to-space ration at over 0.533 gigabits per cubic inch
• Wire rate forwarding for even the smallest packet sizes
• The industry’s lowest latency at down to 5 micro-seconds
• A precision feature set that ensures rapid time-to-deployment, and high reliability

 

Juniper to unveil programmable core switch for software-defined networking

Juniper Networks is readying a new programmable core switch to address software-defined networking in campuses and data centers.

Sources say it is called the EX9200 and is based on the MX router. It comes in three configurations: 4-slot, 8-slot and 14-slot chassis, the same form factors as the company's successful MX 240, 480 and 960 routers for enterprises and service providers.

Credit: Juniper

Sources say that the form factor of Juniper Networks' new programmable core switch is based on the company's MX family of routers, shown here.

An overview of it can be found here. Juniper confirmed it will be unveiling a "new, advanced switch" and offered an embargoed briefing, but Network World declined.

The EX9200 is based on custom silicon -- the Juniper One programmable ASIC. The MX 240, 480 and 960 are based on Juniper's I-Chip and Trio chipsets. The EX9200 will support 240G/slot, and 40xGigabit Ethernet, 32x10G, 4x40G and 2x100G interface line cards.

Programmability features, in addition to the Juniper One ASIC, include an XML- and Netconf-accessible automation toolkit, and Puppet, Python and OpenFlow interfaces. Puppet is an open-source operations management software system; Python is a programming language; and OpenFlow is a popular controller-to-switch protocol and API for SDNs.

SDNs are a way to make network more programmable through software so that they can be reconfigured quickly and functionally extended more easily.

The EX9200 will also support plug-ins to orchestration systems from VMware and OpenStack.
The One ASIC will support VXLAN and NVGRE network virtualization, and MPLS-over-IP as programmable features. Juniper will program the ASIC itself initially but then plans to allow third-parties to eventually program in some features.

The EX9200 will support 1 million MAC addresses, 256k routes, 32,000 VLANs and 256k ACLs. It will support Layer 2/3 switching, MPLS, VPLS, L3VPN, point-to-multipoint, and 50 msec convergence using MPLS Fast Re-Route.

Sources say it will perform two-node Virtual Chassis, where two switches can be linked to form one logical switch, essentially creating a fabric. The EX8200 can be configured into a four-switch Virtual Chassis.

That the EX9200 is based on the MX router -- not the current EX platform -- and uses custom silicon before QFabric is indicative of the challenges Juniper is facing in enterprise and data center switching. The EX8200 has not had a major line card or switch fabric refresh since it was announced in 2008. And QFabric is based on merchant silicon -- Broadcom's Trident chipset -- after custom silicon reportedly failed to work and Juniper was pressed to get a much-hyped, much-anticipated product to market.

In last year's 500-employee, 5% staff reduction, speculation had it that Juniper cut loose many employees working on QFabric. Juniper said those reports were "inaccurate."

Around the same time, RK Anand, one of Juniper's early engineers and head of its data center switching group, departed, along with three other executive vice president-level officials. The data center switching group was also combined with the campus and branch business unit under Jonathan Davidson, whose background is largely in service provider routing.

The EX9200 also raises questions on the status and future of the EX8200 core campus switch, the QFabric Interconnect data center fabric switch and even the EX6200 "Simply Connected" core switch. Juniper has not disclosed or even hinted at any meaningful upgrade plans for the EX8200, such as 40/100G Ethernet or any next-generation switch fabric cards to support high density, high speed interfaces.

Juniper is also cagey on whether there will be a next-generation QFabric and if it will incorporate custom ASICs instead of merchant silicon. That QFabric sales have been slow -- and now that the EX9200 is imminent -- might be a signal that Juniper plans to go in another direction in fabric switching, specifically in the core, or spine.

Sources have said that QFabric has essentially been placed in maintenance mode: that significant development has ceased and only incremental features and fixes are currently planned, such as the possibility of fabric extenders. They also said that Juniper determined QFabric to be too complex and cost too much to build added features onto.

Some sources labeled the EX9200 as a "gap filler," or "MX paint job" until Juniper sorts out its campus and data center switching strategy. Juniper declined to comment on these issues.

Juniper Launches Cloud-Based Security Intelligence Service

Juniper's Junos Spotlight Secure service will give businesses greater insight into attackers, threats and the devices used in attacks.

Juniper Networks is looking to give organizations the up-to-date security intelligence they need to protect themselves against cyber attacks on their networks.

At the RSA Conference this week, Juniper unveiled a number of new and enhanced security products, in particularly Junos Spotlight Secure, a cloud-based service designed to give users greater intelligence about attackers, threats and individual devices, and will spread that intelligence across various network and security products.

In addition, Juniper and RSA, the security unit of storage giant EMC, are expanding their relationship through a technology partnership that will result in a high level of intelligence sharing between Juniper's Junos Spotlight Security service and RSA's Live threat delivery service, and using RSA's Security Analytics tool to give customers greater insight into the security threats they're facing.

"Next-generation security must be built on automated and actionable intelligence that can be quickly shared to meet the demands of modern and evolving networks," Nawaf Bitar, senior vice president and general manager of Juniper's security business unit, said in a statement. "This is only possible if you are able to collect definitive information about attackers. Junos Spotlight Secure provides the platform to deliver advanced intelligence with device-level attacker tracking. This integrated approach improves security intelligence, provides collective defense against attackers and delivers true defense in-depth for the data center."

Juniper officials argue that businesses need more than just the IP address of their attackers, but also the devices used in the attacks, and then have the ability to take the intelligence gathered and quickly bring it into the data center and into the network. They are positioning their Junos Spotlight Secure intelligence service as the place where security intelligence on attackers and threats is consolidated and then sent in real time to Juniper's security offerings to act on.

Juniper's Junos WebApp and the company's SRX Series service gateways are the first company products to leverage the Spotlight Secure offering, according to officials.

Junos WebApp Secure—formerly called Mykonos, a company Juniper bought in 2012—is used to integrate the intelligence from other sources that has come from Spotlight Secure, and then lets other Juniper products leverage the intelligence to more accurately defend against attacks. At the same time, Junos WebApp Secure uses Juniper's Intrusion Deception technology to not only profile and fingerprint attackers, but also to misdirect them, according to Juniper.

In addition, Junos WebApp Secure will be integrated into the SRX Series service gateways, enabling the gateways to leverage the intelligence from Spotlight Secure to block attackers, company officials said, noting it will be particularly effective against botnets and large-scale Web attacks.

Along with Spotlight Secure, Juniper also announced Junos DDoS Secure, a distributed denial-of-service protection system aimed at guarding Websites and Web applications against high-volume attacks as well as “low and slow” app attacks. It can either be deployed as software through a virtual machine in cloud environments or as a hardware appliance.

Juniper officials said they will be able to also take advantage of their software-defined networking (SDN) strategy to more quickly bring intelligence to the networks and deploy security services across networks. Organizations will be able to take advantage of Juniper's Junos Space Security Director, which provides centralized management in an SDN environment.

In extending their partnership, Juniper and RSA not only will focus on protecting corporate networks against attacks, but also on bringing greater mobile security services that tie strong authentication with secure remote access. The companies want to get RSA's mobile authentication technologies to interoperate with Juniper's Junos Pulse SSL Secure for remote access to a business' infrastructure.

The companies also want to make sure that the Junos Pulse SSL Secure offering can authenticate native mobile application access, creating a single access point for VPNs and mobile applications.

"Two of the most common requests we get from customers are about improving information sharing and enabling them to deploy greater security on mobile devices," Art Coviello, executive chairman of RSA and executive vice president at EMC, said in a statement. "This expanded technology partnership would enable RSA and Juniper to help address both of those key requirements for customers, and set the stage for increased collaboration on a wider range of advanced security challenges."

 

Cisco vs. Juniper: How different are their SDN strategies?

 

On the surface, Cisco and Juniper's SDN strategies seem to have sharp contrasts if recent announcements are any indication. For example:

 

• Juniper places much more emphasis on the software angle of SDN, even ushering in a new software licensing business model; Cisco's attempts to make hardware as much, and perhaps even more, relevant than software.

• Cisco is attacking five markets at once -- data center, enterprise, service provider, cloud, academia -- with its strategy, while Juniper is focusing initially on data centers.

• Juniper views SDNs as much more disruptive, potentially allowing it to significantly increase share; Cisco has thus far made no such dramatic market impact statements regarding SDNs.

• As part of its hardware focus on SDN, Cisco is funding a separate spin-in company -- Insieme Networks -- which is believed to be building big programmable switches and controller(s); Juniper has no such hardware investments, but did buy Contrail for $176 million, again emphasizing the software aspect of SDNs.

• Cisco has a timeline of 2013 deliverables; Juniper's timeline pushes a controller and SDN service "chaining" capability out into 2014, and the new software business model into 2015.

 

Yet analysts say there are really more similarities than differences in both strategies from the fierce rivals.

"I think there are some similarities," says Brad Casemore of IDC. "Both Juniper and Cisco are emphasizing ASICs, and therefore hardware, in their SDN strategies. Both companies also see network and security services -- Layer 4-7 -- as virtualized applications in a programmable network.

They each have controllers, but they also will promote hybrid control planes -- decoupled and distributed. Juniper is positioning for a software-licensing business model, true, but it's relatively early along in that process."

"It's a different packaging strategy but both seem equally focused on the value of software in SDN," says Mike Fratto of Current Analysis. "Key points being modular, flexible, and exposing APIs for integration."

Juniper recently divulged its SDN strategy after months of silence - seven months after Cisco announced its Cisco ONE plan. Salient points of Juniper's plan include separating networking software into four planes -- Management, Services, Control and Forwarding -- to optimize each plane within the network; creating network and security service virtual machines by extracting service software from hardware and housing it on x86 servers; using a centralized controller that enables service chaining in software, or the ability to connect services across devices according to business need; and the new software-based licensing model, which allows the transfer of software licenses between Juniper devices and industry-standard x86 servers, and is designed to allow customers to scale purchases based on actual usage.

Cisco's ONE, or Open Networking Environment strategy, includes an API platform to instill programmability into its three core operating systems: IOS, IOS XR and NX-OS. It's focused on five key markets and also includes new programmable ASICs, like the UADP chip unveiled with the new Catalyst 3850 enterprise switch; and a software-based controller for data centers that runs on x86 servers. New ASICs are also expected to be front-and-center when the Cisco-funded Insieme Networks start-up unveils what's expected to be a high-performance programmable switch and controller line.

Juniper's strategy initially targets data centers, and its new software licensing model is based on enterprise practices. The company will expand its traditional carrier and service provider customers from there.

Among the first markets addressed in Cisco's ONE strategy are enterprise customers, data centers and cloud providers.

"Juniper ultimately sees SDN at all layers of the network, spanning not only the data center -- edge/access and core --, but also the WAN, campus and branch," says IDC's Casemore. "Juniper's SDN road map initially targets the SP edge and data center, but it does plan to follow SDN into other areas.

"Cisco sees data center and cloud as near-term markets, and its positioning to play across the board as SDN -- and its outcomes, network virtualization and network programmability -- extends its reach," Casemore says. "Again, there are many similarities."

In terms of market disruption, Fratto says both companies see SDN as perhaps equally disruptive even though one has been much more vocal about that impact than the other.

"I think the two companies view SDN as disruptive but they are approaching it very differently," he says. "Juniper tends to be more conservative in bringing new products to market, particularly with Junos. They have a quarterly software update cycle and they march to that drum. I think they have a strong preference for stability in the platform and based on their consistent messaging on that topic.

"I think for Cisco, the disruption is there but the recent announcements tell a lot about its direction going forward," Fratto continues. "I think it signals ... wanting to be vendor and protocol agnostic vs. promoting their own technology over others. The ONE controller, for example, is modular and will support OnePK and Openflow out of the gate, but there is no reason other than development that it can't support other protocols."

Casemore sees both companies reacting to SDN developments, rather than driving them.

"Neither has led the charge toward SDN. Both are measuring their responses, trying to find a balance between supporting their customers today while preparing for potentially disruptive shifts."

And Casemore sees both equally emphasizing hardware, despite Juniper's software-intensive strategy.

"Juniper has a lot of existing hardware, and hardware customers, that it will attempt to fold into its SDN strategy," he says. "We will see hardware and software from both Cisco and Juniper, as their common ASIC strategies suggest."

And even though the timelines for deliverables differ, they are in keeping with each company's traditions.

"That's Juniper's way, right?" Fratto says. "Produce a road map and then deliver over a longer timeline like 12 to 24 months."

Where the strategies diverge will be in partner ecosystems for SDN-enabled services, he says.

"In both cases, they will need to attract partners into their respective ecosystems. The market for services has a ton of players -- think (application delivery controllers), firewalls, WAN optimization.

For those services to be chained, they have to be integrated with Juniper's stuff. Same for Cisco. That's going to be the attractor."

Casemore sees differences in initial target markets too.

"I look at Juniper's strategy as being more attuned to the SP/carrier community than the enterprise -- their service chaining concept is very close to network functions virtualization -- whereas the strategy and technologies Cisco has rolled out thus far are more enterprise oriented," he says. "That's not to say that Juniper won't develop more of an enterprise orientation or that Cisco won't push its SDN strategy into carriers -- both will happen. But that's how I see them now at this particular snapshot in time."

QFabric Architecture Deep Dive: The Inner Workings of a Real Data Center Fabric

QFabric Architecture Deep Dive - Recorded Webcast

http://www.juniper.net/us/en/community/junos/live/111020/

Juniper Brings 80 TB Router to the Edge

Juniper is updating its MX edge router family with two new large scale hardware platforms and new virtualization software capabilities.

The new MX 2020 router is a 20 slot, 7 foot chassis that can deliver up to 80 TB of edge routing capacity in a single platform. Also new is the 10 slot MX 2010 which is a 10 slot chassis, delivering up to 40 TB of capacity. Both platforms eclipse the MX 980 which had been the top end of Juniper's edge routing portfolio coming in at 8.8 TB.

Luc Ceuppens, VP of product marketing at Juniper told EnterpriseNetworkingPlanetthat the new MX hardware is compatible will all existing MX line cards that Juniper customers already have in place. In terms of physical size, the MX 2020 is three times larger than the MX 980, though Ceuppens noted that the MX 2020 delivers more than three times the performance.

He explained that the MX 2020 is based on the same Juniper Trios silicon as the existing MX 960.
That said, Juniper has be able to integrate new advances in packaging and cooling in order to achieve the greater density in the MX 2020.

Virtual Chassis

Juniper does not expect that all of its customers will need or want to move to the bigger MX 2010 or MX 2020 platforms, though some might still want more scale. That's where the MX Virtual Chassis comes in.

Ceuppens explained that with the virtual chassis, existing MX 960 customers can continue to scale. What the technology will enable is for up to 8, MX 960 routers to be clustered together to from a single logical domain.

"Virtual Chassis allows you to grow the number of slots in a node, while maintaining one single control plane," Ceuppens said. "So the operational complexity is not increased when you increase the number of slots."

Mike Marcellin, SVP of product marketing and strategy at Juniper, added that Virtual Chassis isn't just for local groups of MX 960s either. With Virtual Chassis, the MX 960s can be separated by a few hundred kilometers which can provide near instantaneous disaster recovery failover.

Software Defined Networking

Juniper is also advancing the MX platform with a technology called Path Computational Element (PCE). Marcellin noted that PCE can be used to help enable a Software Defined Networking type of deployment. Juniper also has some support for the OpenFlow protocol as well to help enable the programmability of the network.

"OpenFlow can be used to select the specific flow that you want to do some kind of operation on," Marcellin said. "PCE is how you take those flows and steer them through the optimal path across a network."

Linux KVM

The JunosV App engine further enhances the MX routers with a Linux powered KVM virtual hypervisor. Marcellin noted that Juniper is using CentOS as the Linux base. CentOS is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The JunosV App engine is a hypervisor that enables service providers to run applications such as load balancing and security services at the edge of network

 

Juniper Is Building Data Center Network For Terra

Terra, a global digital media company has selected Juniper and its QFabric to help build its data center network. Terra has an audience of around 100 million every month for its sports, news and entertainment content. The company has to maintain its service levels and enhance customer experience every day and one of the things that it needed was a networking vendor who would meet its criteria. Terra needed a solution that would scale across multiple data centers and yet keep it simple.

Terra has chosen QFX3500 from Juniper as an onramp to QFabric. Apart from the simplicity of operations, QFabric will also enhance performance and reduce TCO or total cost of ownership.

After the selection of the QFX series, Terra had already finished up with its data center transformation by converting switches into nodes in a single tier. In the near future, events like the 2016 Summer Olympics and the World Cup in 2014 will put a huge demand on Terra’s services.

Juniper Networks Announces QFabric Interoperability With EMC VMAX and VNX Storage Systems

Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR), the industry leader in network innovation, today announced that its QFabric™ family of products has completed rigorous testing through EMC™ E-Lab and is qualified to interoperate with EMC VMAX™ and VNX™ storage arrays. In addition, Juniper Networks™ QFabric system has been added to EMC's Support Matrix. EMC E-Lab conducts the industry's most rigorous interoperability testing and is the industry gold standard for server networking and storage interoperability.

News Highlights

•EMC E-Lab has completed rigorous interoperability testing on the QFabric solution in an end-to-end, multivendor environment, which included testing and qualification of solutions with hypervisors, operating systems, Converged Network Adapters (CNA), Fibre Channel, Ethernet Switches, and EMC VMAX and EMC VNX storage systems.

•The qualification adds Juniper Networks QFX3500 10GbE top-of-rack switch, QFX3000-M QFabric System and QFX3000-G QFabric System to EMC's Support Matrix.

•The QFabric/EMC interoperability means customers can easily plan, deploy and scale to support growing data storage environments, and quickly respond to changes in their data center networks using the Juniper Networks QFabric system or QFX3500 Switch in EMC VMAX and VNX storage environments.

Supporting Quotes

"Many enterprises manage data centers where compute, storage and networking solutions are multivendor environments, often with additional complexity, and increased provisioning and operational costs. With Juniper's QFabric networking solution having met EMC's qualifications and interoperability requirements, enterprise IT customers will have that extra assurance that QFabric can be successfully deployed as part of inter-operable datacenter infrastructure, creating new opportunities for Juniper."

- Rohit Mehra, vice president, network infrastructure, IDC

"By qualifying Juniper's QFabric family of products through the rigorous EMC E-Lab testing process, customers can confidently deploy QFabric within EMC VMAX and EMC VNX storage environments as they transform their IT infrastructures."

- Carolyn Muise, senior director, EMC E-Lab Worldwide Operations, EMC

"When it comes to storage convergence, vendor compatibility is always a factor for consideration by our customers. Knowing that EMC has extensively tested QFabric technology in a multivendor environment gives us confidence that our clients' Juniper network infrastructure will continue to support their converged data center networking requirements, while at the same time open new revenue streams for us."

- Peter Jansson, senior systems engineer, IGXGlobal

Juniper Networks unveils edge services engine enabling service

Juniper Networks, a provider of network infrastructure services, has unveiled a virtualized platform, an edge services engine enabling service, for a rapid deployment of multivendor applications.

Combined, the new Juniper Networks MX2020 3D Universal Edge Router and new JunosV App Engine transform the network edge into a platform for rapid service deployment, speeding time to revenue by up to 69% compared to other solutions. This helps service providers reverse declining revenue models by removing the complexity and time associated with service deployment, the company said.

"Our vision for the new network is to provide innovations that help transform service providers into super providers," said Rami Rahim, senior vice president, Edge and Aggregation Business Unit, Juniper Networks.

"Thousands of MX customers have validated the need for massive scaling and reduced complexity driven by emerging video, applications, and cloud-based services. We see our new edge services engine as the first solution that truly empowers service providers to take control of their business by removing barriers currently hindering innovation and revenue expansion."

This solution offers new levels of scale for service providers by delivering a gateway for everything the network has to offer: one system, innovative software services, with unlimited revenue possibilities at unconstrained scale.

Mike Wright, executive director of Networks and Access Technologies at Telstra, said: "With data on Telstra's fixed network doubling approximately every 17 months we need a network that is scalable, resilient and integrated. The Juniper Edge Services Router assists Telstra to manage content delivery, is highly scalable and integrates our networks. Using this equipment in our network assists us to manage the ever increasing volumes of traffic on the Telstra network."

Juniper Makes MX Edge Router Platform for Service Providers

 

With new software and hardware on its MX edge router, Juniper wants to make it easier for service providers to add services, find customers and reduce costs.

Juniper Networks is looking to make it easier and faster for service providers to develop and offer services to both consumers and businesses.

 

Juniper on Oct. 2 unveiled a host of new hardware and software offerings designed to run on the vendor’s MX Series 3D Universal Edge Router, essentially making the network edge be the platform for service providers looking to add capabilities and scale their networks. Through the platform, service providers will be able to deliver and expand their services at a rate 69 percent faster than with competing solutions, while seeing reductions in total ownership, administration, operational and management costs, according to Juniper officials.

 

The vendor’s Universal Edge push comes at a time when the rapid growth in such trends as cloud computing, the mobile Internet and video are putting pressure on service providers and their networks. As consumers and businesses demand more services, service providers also are scrambling for ways to monetize their networks.

 

And the demand will only grow, according Aruna Ravichandran, vice president of product marketing for Juniper. According to the company, 50 billion devices will connect to wireless networks by 2020, and by 2015, 60 percent of broadband traffic will be streaming video and audio. In addition, by 2016, the amount of money spent on public cloud services will hit $100 billion.

 

“The cloud is no longer hype,” Ravichandran told eWEEK. “It’s a reality. Most people realize that the cloud offers significant [capital expense] and [operational expense] savings.”

 

Service providers are at once trying to add new subscribers, offer differentiated services and leverage their networks to generate more revenue while looking to reduce the overall costs of running their networks, she said. The new software and hardware products run on the MX Series 3D Universal Edge Router, which already has been deployed by more than 2,200 customers and, through the Junos Trio chipset, can scale bandwidth and subscribers, according to Juniper.

 

Among the new offerings on the router is the Junos Content Encore, with the MX Application Services Modular Line Card. The capabilities found in the line card traditionally were offered in a software format, according to Ravichandran. Now those capabilities—from firewalls to In-Plane Switching (IPS) to content management—can be offered in the line card as either software or an appliance, and having it as part of the MX Router will help drive down overall costs, be significantly more energy-efficient and drive the 69 percent faster deployment of services.

 

The line card, at 40 Gps capabilities, improves the delivery of streaming video, video on demand and other premium content broadband services to multiple devices, from smartphones to laptops. The content caching applications bring these capabilities in the single line card with enough capacity to stream as many as 80,000 videos at the same time.

 

The Junos Web Aware software lets service providers offer parental-control services and targeted advertising, enabling them to differentiate their services and grow their capabilities in the $31 billion ad market, Ravichandran said.

 

The JunosV Firefly is software that enables service providers to quickly offer virtualized managed services, including virtualized security. The key is that with this technology, service providers can ensure that traffic for each customer is isolated and secure, and won’t be exposed to other customers in the cloud. The Junos Node Unifier brings together MX routers and Juniper top-of-rack switches to create a single virtualized element to make it easier for service providers to manage multiple nodes, streamline operations and reduce costs.

 

Through Juniper’s Business Cloud CPE, enterprises leveraging service provider clouds can offload the monitoring and Layer 3 routing intelligence from their own infrastructures and onto the service provider’s MX router. With this capability, enterprises can reduce the cost of managing complex on-site equipment, and service providers can offer a new range of managed services.

 

Junos Web Aware, Junos Node Unifier and Business Cloud CPE are available immediately. The Junos Content Encore, with the MX Application Services Modular Line Card will be available in the fourth quarter and the JunosV Firefly in the second quarter of 2013.

 

Juniper planning open source alternative to Cisco, VMware SDN controllers

 

Data centre and campus networks are where Juniper sees the immediate short-term benefits of SDNs because the infrastructure is geographically concentrated

 

 

Juniper is working with other industry players on an open source-based controller for software-defined networks (SDN) that would be an alternative to proprietary offerings from VMware and Cisco.

 

 

Juniper hopes to have an open source SDN controller emerge as a de facto standard that's broadly supported by the industry, much like Linux, Apache and Hadoop have become in open source operating system, Web server and big data analytics, said Bob Muglia (pictured), executive vice president of Juniper's Software Solutions Division. He does not consider current open source SDN controllers, like Floodlight, Nox, Trema and others, to have attained that status yet.

 

 

"We think the likely thing and the best thing for the industry is to have an open source controller emerge that becomes a third standard controller," Muglia said in an interview with Network World this week. "One that is available broadly across companies and supports the broad set of capabilities that are needed. That has yet to emerge. And we are looking closely and working with a number of players in the industry to determine how it is likely to emerge."

 

 

A couple of the other participants Muglia mentioned are IBM and Microsoft. Muglia was a longtime Microsoft executive before moving to Juniper a year ago.

 

 

Isolating that de facto open source controller standard seems to be a priority for the company because VMware and Cisco, with their leadership positions in server virtualisation and data centre switching, and major investments in programmable networking, will have significant market positions in SDNs .

 

 

VMware just bought network virtualization startup Nicira for $1.26 billion, and Cisco funded startup and potential spin-in Insieme Networks with $100 million, and may acquire it for $750 million more.

SDN is a significant growth opportunity for Juniper

"We're actually working kind of hard on it," Muglia says of the open source SDN controller effort. "It's sensible for Juniper because we want to be disruptive in this space."

 

 

Juniper recently laid out its SDN strategy, which includes adding OpenFlow support to specific products next year. The company considers SDN, which makes multi-vendor networks programmable through software, a significant growth opportunity for Juniper because it's coming from a small installed base of LAN and data centre switching. Juniper has about a 3 percent share of the $20 billion Ethernet switch market, good for a No. 3 position behind Cisco and HP, but small enough to have "a lot of upside," Muglia says.

 

 

And the data centre and campus networks are where Juniper sees the immediate short-term benefits of SDNs because the infrastructure is geographically concentrated. Programming a network is harder when the elements are geographically dispersed.

 

 

"When a disruptive thing comes in like SDN, there's a significant opportunity to change some of the dynamics of the market share," Muglia says. "So we see this as being very, very positive for us."

Yet, while working on a standard open source controller, Muglia also says Juniper will support whatever VMware does in SDNs due to its market influence and intrinsic technology.

Juniper's SDN controller will not be based on OpenFlow

"They're an important part of the data centre hypervisor and orchestration market and in the cloud space," he says. "We will support what they do."

 

 

Support does not, however, imply fully embracing a technology or direction or strategy. Muglia did characterise the VMware/Nicira controller as proprietary; open source code is renowned for being just that: open and freely accessible.

 

 

Still, Muglia could not say whether Juniper will brand its own SDN controller or source another. One thing is for sure though - while it will support the OpenFlow protocol, it will not be based on it.

 

 

"OpenFlow is one of the protocols for this controller to support," Muglia says. "There are scenarios in the WAN case where OpenFlow has provided a benefit," such as Google's data centre interconnection application. "When we look in the data center domain, and in particular in the switching aspects of the data centre, it is not clear that OpenFlow will be the key protocol. OpenFlow is about controlling the networking services, the Layer 2/Layer 3 services of the switches. And we're not at all clear that there's a lot of control that needs to be done there. We certainly don't believe that control has to be done on a per flow basis.

 

 

"On the other hand, when you deal with the policy that has to be set on a given application, for a given tenant in a cloud, that's interesting. And that needs to get established probably between the virtual switches and the hypervisor. That seems to be the way the industry is going, with Layer 2 overlay services sitting on top of a Layer 3 routed network. There, the protocols that seem to be more relevant to us, that have emerged thus far, are VXLAN and NVGRE. "