Juniper is likely to seek a suitor given the resource requirements necessary to support large customers. If they decide to pursue the IPO route, then it is likely that they will lag Cisco despite, as you mentioned, the talented team there. Most, if not all of the remaining terabit players will need to take this route as well. To date, Juniper is the only company shipping a product with this capacity. Avici is at least 6-12 months away, Argon Networks was purchased by Sieman's this week (240 mil total). Nexabit is making progress on the hardware but is potentially lagging in the software feature set. Given Lucent's need to compete with Cisco and the fact that Juniper's founders are ex-Cisco engineers that approached the routing architecture in a very similar manner to that of Cisco, a Lucent-Juniper partnership or outright acquisition would go along way towards getting Lucent into the game head to head with cisco and would likely cause Cisco some severe headaches. Given the recent announcement by UUNet for plans involving the M40, now might be the time for lucent to make the play. Ascend, Juniper and an access router (Redstone or other) would create a powerhouse that might be able to go toe to toe with cisco in their bread and butter ISP accounts.
Juniper breaks silence with router OS rollout
JUNOS designed for scale, reliability; software key to unseating Cisco in 'Net core.
By Jim Duffy
Network World Fusion, 7/1/98
Mountain View, Calif. - Heavily funded router start-up Juniper Networks, Inc. broke its silence today by unveiling the operating system behind its forthcoming Internet backbone router.
Juniper, which has been the most closely watched of the high-speed router start-ups because of its funding and funders - $62 million from the likes of Lucent Technologies, Inc., Northern Telecom, Ltd. And 3Com Corp. - has also been the most tight-lipped about its product development. That may be because the company does not want to tip its hand on something that might actually give Cisco Systems, Inc. a run for the Internet backbone money.
Still, Juniper did tip its hand ever so slightly with the introduction of its JUNOS operating system. Rather than a delivery vehicle for differentiated classes of Internet services, the JUNOS software is designed to help scale the Internet via traffic engineering and ensure predictable service through software reliability, said Joe Furgerson, Juniper director of marketing.
For end users, this translates into increased uptime and consistent service, Furgerson said. Juniper users concur.
"It dramatically increases our confidence that we will have access to the technology to keep scaling along with what the demands on the network are," said Michael O'Dell, vice president and chief scientist at UUNET Technologies, Inc. "We can keep running. That's the important part of this."
More than superfast routing and switching hardware, which most start-ups have been highlighting, software will be the key enabler of Internet performance and reliability, Juniper asserts. And software will be the way the gain entry into Cisco's lockhold on the Internet core, Furgerson said.
"In entering this market, you've got to answer the question about why one vendor has 85% to 90% of the market. We think it is the special complexity and special implications of software in the Internet core," Furgerson said. "Unless you essentially get on the back of the bull you never catch up. You've got to get your software base qualified first."
"[The software] is where the scaling challenges are in a number of dimensions," said UUNET's O'Dell. "There are some profound limits to the Old Same Thing," he said, in an apparent reference to Cisco's installed base issues.
Juniper said JUNOS will be a strong entry into Cisco's base. For traffic engineering, the software features the Internet Engineering Task Force's Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) specification for mapping IP packets and flows onto frame relay or ATM virtual circuits. MPLS helps ISPs manage growth and provides a foundation on which other value-added services - such as differentiated classes of service and virtual private networks - can be offered over the Internet backbone, Juniper said.
For reliability, JUNOS is based on a modular software architecture with separate programs running in protected memory space on top of a Unix kernel. This approach improves reliability by ensuring that modifications made to one software module have no unwanted side effects on other sections of the software, the company said.
Monolithic, nonmodular operating systems that do not run in protected memory are prone to system-wide failure, Juniper said.
For added reliability, JUNOS brings a number of features that includes configuration and monitoring tools to avoid user error that leads to network downtime. JUNOS allows users to test complex changes before applying them to a live environment. The software allows operators to apply configuration changes in logical blocks, and if the new configuration contains an error, the software automatically reverts back to the initial configuration.
JUNOS also offers a variety of routing protocols, such as Border Gateway Protocol 4, Open Shortest Path First, Intermediate System-to-Intermediate System, and Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol and Protocol Independent Multicast for controlling multicast traffic. JUNOS also has been rigorously tested by four ISPs and a telecom equipment provider, including @Home Networks, LM Ericsson, MCI, UUNET and Verio, Inc.
JUNOS will debut later this year with Juniper's Internet backbone router. As usual, Juniper was mum on router details. |
