Start-Up: Optical IP Routers Are
The Future
(03/09/99, 1:14 p.m. ET)
By John Dunn, Network Week
IP routers based on optical technology and
MPLS are about to sweep away the current
generation of multiprotocol routers,
according to U.S. routing start-up Juniper
Networks. This was the opinion of the
company's CEO and founder, Scott Kriens,
when he announced the European
availability of Juniper's debut product, the
40-gigabit-per-second M40 backbone router,
last week.
He said the router was already being used by
MCI-WorldCom and being assessed by a number of
other major carriers, including British
Telecommunications.
Kriens said the product would initially be aimed at
meeting the bandwidth demands of ISPs, but he also
speculated the underlying optical and MPLS
technology could become a building block of corporate
WANs within three years.
"Internet routing is utterly different from the
multiprotocol routing of the past. The market for IP
infrastructure requires products that are built from the
ground up for the Internet," he said.
Despite its technology being unproven, Juniper has
attracted a lot of attention in the United States after
stealing a lead over Cisco with its JUNOS routing OS,
core optical technology, and innovative ASIC
designs.
In terms of raw packet-forwarding, the M40 is still the
performance leader in its class, many months after its
U.S. launch.
Kriens was predictably critical of Cisco, despite
identifying the company as Juniper's chief rival, saying it
had been slow to adopt new routing architectures. He
said San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco was too preoccupied
with protecting its investment in IOS and "legacy"
routing architectures.
The M40 incorporates the Internet Engineering Task
Force's MPLS, one of the first shipping products to do
so, has interfaces for ATM, SDH/SONET, and Gigabit
Ethernet networks, and also supports direct connection
to DWDM hardware. It has a starting price of
34,000 pounds ($55,014) plus 15,000 pounds
($24,270) per module. |
