Juniper Networks Inc. on Monday announced it is introducing four Ethernet service interface cards to enable nondisruptive migration to advanced Ethernet services for service providers using its M series and T series routing platforms.
The new portfolio is in answer to providers’ changing requirements for Ethernet services, said Tom DiMicelli, Juniper’s product marketing manager. “It’s not just based on transport anymore but on quality of service and deterministic performance and scale. This requires more reliability; it requires high performance, and it requires the ability to adhere to an SLA. That’s an entirely new class of Ethernet products.”
The new cards for Juniper’s M series edge routers are available immediately and include a four-port gigabit Ethernet card supporting up to 4:1 oversubscription and an eight-port gigE card supporting up to 2:1 oversubscription. For the T series core routers, Juniper is introducing an eight-port gigE card supporting line-rate performance on all interfaces and a single port line-rate 10gigE card. The line-rate cards will be available in the third quarter.
By including the cards on existing, proven platforms that also support frame relay and ATM services, DiMicelli says carriers can “do a modular transition to Ethernet services side by side with their existing services.” The Juniper solution also enables interworking between ATM, frame relay, VPN and Ethernet networks, ensuring a seamless migration from these legacy technologies.
The benefit of frame relay and ATM is differentiated service classes; the downside is they are relatively expensives infrastructures to run, said DiMicelli. “The service providers all want to move to Ethernet, but they can’t sacrifice those differentiated service classes. … That’s the problem we solve.”
To that end, all the cards feature QoS capabilities, so service providers can offer guaranteed SLAs for a variety of Ethernet services, such as VLAN/transparent LAN, layer 2 and 3 VPNs, VoIP and video over IP.
“In order to ensure and protect the investment that our service provider customers are making in these products, we’ve also added a key feature – software programmability,” said DiMicelli. “By having software programmability, as standards evolve and mature and as services are identified and provided and implemented, we can add support for those capabilities via software to the existing hardware platforms.”
DiMicelli said the oversubscription cards are designed for use at the edge where underutilization is common. “If you dedicated line-rate performance to those cards, you are wasting bandwidth and capacity during the periods when it’s underutilized,” he said. “Oversubscribed Ethernet makes economic and efficiency sense there because you would be able to support more devices than you have bandwidth for. However, with the QoS features and prioritization features, you would be able to ensure that even if everyone bursts simultaneously, those customers and those flows that are prioritized will continue to get through the network.”
The line-rate cards would be used between an M series edge router and a core router for edge-to-core aggregation, between two core routers, or between a core switch and an Internet router.
“The interesting and exciting thing here is that it meets the service providers’ needs when they take Ethernet beyond a best-effort service and actually want to run high-value business class of differentiated services across their network using Ethernet,” said DiMicelli.
Juniper Networks Inc. www.juniper.net
