King of the routers, Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO), is reportedly readying new gear intended to go head-to-head with edge router equipment from Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) and Juniper Networks (JNPR).
According to an analyst report, the new solutions could eventually replace Cisco’s 7600 and GSR 12000 lines.
Edge routers have in recent months been expanding their functionality ─ supporting a wider variety of both newer and legacy protocols and services, and bundling in new security features. This pumped-up functionality is largely in response to the fact that service providers are facing margin pressures due to declining wireline and wireless ARPU, while at the same time being pushed to invest in more infrastructure to support rich media, among other traffic.
For example, Juniper recently unveiled a variety of new hardware and software functionality for its M- and MX-series routers. Juniper said these enhancements fall under its Intelligent Services Edge effort, which leverages a single, consistent operating system ─ JUNOS ─ and high-performance hardware to deliver a variety of services, including broadband routing, voice, multimedia and integrated security, as well as application-level awareness. The Intelligent Services Edge extends the power of JUNOS, according to Juniper, by adding broadband services routing, which extends subscriber management technology from the E-series Broadband Services Routers to the M- and MX-series platforms; dynamic application awareness, which leverages Juniper’s security and policy management to provide stateful, subscriber-aware application monitoring, enabling advanced, application-specific service levels and QoS treatments; intrusion prevention, which provides application-layer security leveraging Juniper’s intrusion detection and prevention (IDP) technology; and session border control (SBC) functionality, which manages VoIP and multimedia sessions to ensure QoS and security for VoIP and multimedia applications.
Meanwhile, Redback offers the SmartEdge family of edge routers, which offer a modular OS, support both ATM- and Ethernet-based aggregation, deliver IP MPLS edge routing functionality to enable VPN business services, can identify and apply various treatments for different applications, and include a variety of addition features including deep packet inspection, session border controller and P2P control functionality.
And Alcatel-Lucent sells the 7750 Service Routers and 7450 Ethernet Service Switches, which it last year enhanced by increasing by 10 times their capacity and adding new availability, deep packet inspection, IPSec, OAM and quality of service features.
