From The Net Economy
February 5, 2002
Juniper Fills In Edge Offering
By Joe McGarvey
Vendor reconfigures current router for the edge; new, scalable core routers expected.
Taking another step in expanding its product portfolio beyond core routing, Juniper Networks today introduced a new edge router and several accompanying features and services.
The introduction of the M40e, however, is more of a re-christening than a product launch. By adding the lowercase "e" to the product name, Juniper has officially designated the company's original core router as an edge device. It is a process that many of Juniper's customers have been carrying out unofficially for years, as they started to move their M40s to the edge with the introduction of the M160, a core successor with four times the capacity.
In addition to the features introduced today, including a new interface card, the M40 has been "edge-optimized" largely through additional hardware and software redundancy.
"As you move to the edge, you're more concerned with hardware redundancy," says Dave Barone, product-line manager for edge products at Juniper. "The enhancement here is the redundancy and edge services."
A big part of Juniper's edge push is that it is bringing the reliability and scalability of its backbone routers to the part of the network that interfaces directly with the service provider's customers. Only a hardened and trusted platform, says Barone, makes a suitable foundation for the delivery of IP services. The M40e, he says, combines the intelligence of a specialized IP-services box with the flexibility and power of a router.
Barone says that the anticipated rollout of network-based services, such as VPNs, encryption and firewalls, has been delayed largely because service providers have not had the proper tools to deliver these services in a manner that would prompt enterprise customers to abandon internal management of their networks. The biggest shortcoming of the first batch of IP-services devices, says Barone, is their inability to scale, forcing carriers to make expensive alterations to existing business practices in order to roll out services.
"You can say you have a feature," says Barone, "but if turning it on brings down a line card, or isn't supported, it adds complexity to the operational demands of a service provider."
At Juniper's most-recent earnings announcement, CEO Scott Kriens said that service providers faced a fundamental question regarding the distribution of intelligence in the network. He said that Juniper was committed to a model in which intelligence resided in the service provider's network rather in equipment located at the customer premises.
Alluding to Cisco's substantial enterprise business, Barone says that Juniper is forging a strong partnership with service providers by committing exclusively to the idea of an intelligent network and not targeting equipment at the service provider's customers.
Enhancements to Juniper's edge equipment include a new interface card that lets service providers easily link multiple T-1 connections into a single pipe. The technology is designed to give service providers a larger plate of bandwidth options between 1.5 megabits per second and the 45 Mbps speed of a DS-3 connection.
"We think the bundled T-1 market is underserved," says Barone, offering a recent study conducted by RHK that forecasts strong demand for the service as evidence.
Bundled T-1 service could also be an attractive alternative to offering Ethernet services in areas that are not served by fiber connections. Estimates vary, but most industry observers place the penetration of businesses served by Ethernet at around 10 percent.
Leveraging the company's experience with the MPLS and BGP routing protocols, the new edge services include support for a variety of approaches to offering Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPNs.
Barone deflected claims from startup manufacturers, such as Gotham Networks and Laurel Networks, that their equipment is more suitable for delivering IP services because the gear was purpose-built for the edge environment. Juniper laid the foundation for its edge products a couple of years ago, says Barone, when it introduced its second generation of processors and operating system. Both the OS and the processor, he says, were designed with the delivery of edge services in mind.
For Juniper, however, the edge is just one of several markets outside of the core that the company is addressing in 2002. Kriens said that the mobile market, in which Juniper is teaming with Ericsson, and the cable market will also be significant targets for sales of Juniper's routers. Juniper purchased a manufacturer of cable-modem termination systems at the end of last year.
The company is not expected to decrease its research-and-development efforts in the core, however. Although Barone stuck to company policy of not talking about unannounced products, industry observers, including Juniper's competitors, expect the company to deliver successors to its core product line in the near future. Carriers have largely endorsed the need for routers that can be strung together internally to scale to several terabits of capacity. Avici currently ships this type of router and several others, such as Caspian Networks, Hyperchip and Pluris, have similar systems on the way.
Juniper's current routers are standalone devices, requiring service providers to give up interface ports to interconnect more than one router. Observers suspect that Juniper will introduce a more scalable router sometime this year.
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