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Cisco rival looks to steal MSC120 thunder

Juniper announces 250G/4Tbps chipset to one up CRS-1 upgrade

By Jim Duffy on Thu, 02/04/10 - 10:06pm.

It's almost like clockwork. Once word leaked earlier this week that Cisco is prepping an upgrade to its CRS-1 core router to take it to 120G per slot, Juniper this week said it has a new generation of silicon to take its T series core routers to 250G per slot, full duplex.

We've seen the curiously coincidental timing with Cisco and Juniper announcements before -- remember the thunder stealing with data center switching two years ago?

In any event, the new Juniper chipset will allow a single, half-rack sized T series router to achieve 4Tbps of system capacity, about twice that expected from Cisco's MSC120, the upgrade to the CRS-1. Currently, the T1600 has a per slot capacity of 100Gbps and a full system capacity of 1.6Tbps.

By comparison, the CRS-1 currently has a 40G per slot capacity and a full system capacity of 1.28Tbps.

Juniper says the new chipset will help the T series support line rate 100G Ethernet. SURFnet is a Juniper that currently has 100G Ethernet trials underway. Meanwhile, Comcast is trialing 100G Ethernet on Cisco's CRS-1. Both Juniper and Cisco are expected to ship 100G Ethernet interfaces on their core routers this year.

The first trials with products that use the new Juniper T series chipset are scheduled for the second half of 2010 and will be available for purchase in early 2011. That's about the same timeframe that Cisco's MSC120 is expected.

And timing is everything.

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