Juniper hopes to boost 'Net with massive M40 router

Mountain View, Calif.

A rapidly growing Internet requires rapidly growing routers, and Juniper last week stepped up to fill the need with an Internet backbone router that can move 40 million packets per second.

The M40 is one of the first routers on this scale, about 10 times faster than Cisco's 12000. But even faster routers are on the horizon. By next year, start-ups such as Avici Systems and Pluris plan to roll out routers that can scale up to terabits per second, a huge step up from the M40's 40G bit/sec.

Juniper has been one of the most closely watched start-ups since receiving $62 million in funding last year from such notable vendors as 3Com, Ericsson, Lucent, Nortel and UUNET WorldCom.

Because Juniper's routers will be deployed in the heart of the Internet, end users are unlikely to see direct benefits. "These products will just help the Internet to keep chugging along, and hopefully, keep it from dying under its own weight," says Bob Bellman, president of Brooktrail Research in Natick, Mass.

Apparently, relief from the heavy demand is what service provider MCI WorldCom needs. "We're not looking for new services; we're just looking to scale the Internet up," says Rick Wilder, director of advanced Internet engineering at MCI WorldCom. In addition to the Juniper box, MCI is testing a high-speed Lucent router, which is under development; the Cisco 12000; and equipment from Argon Networks, Avici and others.

MCI also is looking into offering services over the routers to give some types of traffic priority over others. In this scenario, time-sensitive voice traffic could get through the network ahead of data traffic, Wilder says.

The M40 uses an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) to process all packets that go through the box, says Scott Kriens, Juniper CEO. The ASIC can be programmed for special services, such as breaking data into separate classes of service. Interfaces run ATM or IP over SONET up to OC-48, or 2.4G bit/sec.

Routes are discovered by a Pentium processor running Juniper's software, called Junos. The software populates the route table for the ASIC, which handles all aspects of packet forwarding. This central-processor technique differs from competing approaches, which rely on an array of slower packet-forwarding processors interconnected by a high-speed switching fabric.

The M40 is, therefore, a simpler system, Kriens says. The reason this technique hadn't been tried before is that it requires the software be written from the ground up to work in an ASIC-based system, he says.

Rival Argon, which plans to have a switch ready in the first half of next year, says Juniper's router focuses more on IP than ATM, which might be a limitation for carriers committed to ATM. But the M40 can receive ATM cells and convert them to IP packets, or turn packets into cells. This interoperability will likely be enough for most carriers, Bellman says.

The M40 costs $55,000, with modules starting at $25,000. It's shipping now.

Juniper: (650) 526-8000