The Sunnyvale, California-based vendor has beefed up is its E320 router, with improvements in three areas, said Per Lembre, Juniper’s head of broadband marketing for EMEA. On the system capacity front, the box has gone from 100Gbps to 320Gbps, leapfrogging the most muscular competitor, the SE800 box from Redback Networks Inc, which maxes out at 240Gbps, while the other competitor Juniper acknowledges in the BSR space is the 10008 ESR from Cisco, which tops out at 50Gbps.
He said, in terms of port density, you have to take into account all the capabilities for hierarchical scheduling and shaping, and getting all the sessions supplied at scale, you can’t compare these systems with Ethernet switches. With the E320 now at 192 Ethernet ports per box, it exceeds both the SE800 (120) and the 10008 ESR (122), with the added advantage that it is 40Gb-ready, unlike the competitors.
In terms of the number of concurrent sessions supported, it has gone from 48,000 to 128,000, where the SE800 is still at 48,000, and the 10008 at 62,000. Lembre said the comparison must be by number of sessions rather than subscribers supported because while some carriers devote one session for each service received, others give devote a single session, and thus one IP address, to a household and then deploy a routed gateway and carry out shaping on top for the individual services.
Networking vendors regularly leapfrog one another in this way, so one of the others will surely announce something to overtake Juniper in one or other of these areas in the coming months. Still, it is a sign that BSR vendors now have to think about scale and throughput, as services such as IPTV and video on demand begin to gain momentum in the market.
A more significant development that it indicates an evolution in Juniper’s approach to the market is the company’s recognition of the importance of oversubscription on BSR platforms.
Traditionally, our E-Series devices run wire rate on every port, Lembre said. However, he said carriers like Telenor are moving aware from carrying out aggregation prior to the BSR, preferring instead to drive demand on port densities onto the BSR itself, plugging the DSLAM directly into the BSR, oversubscription becomes desirable, because in that scenario you want density rather than guaranteed wire rate on every port.
He acknowledged that the E320 now supports a degree of oversubscription. It’s not huge oversubscription, he said. You can still do wire rate with 120 ports. One result of this change is that Juniper has endowed the individual I/O modules on the front of the box with multicast capabilities. When you’re doing wire rate forwarding it’s not such a hassle to replicate all the packets to all ports at the same time, but when there’s oversubscription, you can be more efficient at the back end by replicating the packets on the I/O blades, he said.
In tandem with the E320 enhancements, Juniper also announced a partnership with HP for service management. Their OpenView [network management system] already talks to our E- and M-Series at the packet handling and transport levels, but now we’re also integrating with their service management platform, enabling carriers to go up to Layer 7 for performance statistics and reports, he said. This enables them to know who’s watching what, which will be important to help target advertising, even to the degree of personalizing ad fees going forward.
An existing partnership with Siemens AG is also undergoing extension by Juniper after it acquired Siemens’ Unisphere broadband access business in 2002. Siemens continues to sell the devices and represents in excess of 10% of Juniper’s overall revenue as a result, making it obligatory for Juniper to declare that fact in its financials. The two also maintain a joint facility to demo their end-to-end carrier networking capabilities, the Resilient IP Lab, which Lembre said works on best-design practices for operators.
Until now it’s worked mainly on voice trunking in IP networks, he said, but now we’re extending it to multiplay functionality for the core and the edge of a network. Multiplay is Juniper’s term for what others are calling triple- and quad-play, running voice, internet/data and video, as well as mobile/cellular traffic, over a single IP network infrastructure.
Siemens’ carrier networking business is in the process of merging with Nokia to become Nokia Siemens Networks, with much of the management appearing to go to the Finnish side of the house. Lembre could not comment as to how this might impact the Siemens/Juniper partnership. Still, as Nokia isn’t really in the broadband access market, the likelihood is that the business, and also the relationship with Juniper, won’t be disturbed by the change.
