Service Provider Networks / Internet Routing /

Customers, competitors size up 'Gibson' router

By Jim Duffy
The Edge, 04/24/02

A Juniper customer says he passed up the company's first-generation 10G bit/sec platform in anticipation of the new one, which debuted earlier this week.

Meanwhile, Juniper's competitors predictably dismissed the company's T640 Internet Routing Node - commonly referred to by its codename 'Gibson' - as technologically deficient and ill-suited for the market. They say the 10G bit/sec densities in Gibson's form factor may cause the unit to overheat, and that the Internet core is not the area where service provider's have the most immediate need.

"Their focus is on the wrong place; they're missing the mark," says Rob Redford, vice president of marketing in Cisco's Internet Router group. Cisco says service providers' real pain point is creating new service revenues at the edge of the network, not on building out a bandwidth-saturated core.

"(Gibson is) out of touch with market reality, a forklift upgrade and it does not create new revenue opportunities," Redford says.

Juniper suggested that Cisco might actually be the vendor that's out of touch.

"This is the same guy that said bandwidth wasn't increasing a little while ago" in a Network World story, quipped Kevin Dillon, director of portfolio marketing at Juniper. "Core routers are an enabler of revenue because you have important capabilities, such as MPLS and all that, that are key for routers to support. The other aspect is that the health of a service provider's business is related to revenue that they pull in from their edge devices, but it's also related to the asset longevity of their core devices. That's a very primary benefit of the T640."

One customer begs to differ with Redford's point on market reality but is in agreement with his view on the upgrade.

NTT/Verio is currently deploying two Gibsons in facilities in Palo Alto, with plans to install 10 more. NTT/Verio views the T640 as a more suitable platform than Juniper's first-generation 10G bit/sec offering, the M160, for upgrading its core from OC-48 to OC-192.

"We actually skipped the M160 generation and went straight from (Juniper's OC-48) M40s to T640s," says Doug Junkins, vice president for IP engineering in NTT/Verio's global IP networks group. "We made the conscious decision to try and stick with the M40s, scale up to the limits of those boxes, and try and make it until the T640 was released. We skipped a level of forklift upgrades."

A packet-reordering problem in the M160's OC-192c capabilities also factored into NTT/Verio's decision to bypass that platform. Under specific and rare conditions, the M160 would misorder packets in a flow entering the router through an OC-192c link.

The result would be corrupted communications.

"It played a subtle role in the decision," Junkins says. "We didn't intend to go to 10G bit/sec services until the T640 was available. But the fact that there was that underlying architectural issue (with the M160) did make us think that maybe we didn't want to have them in the network unless we really needed to."

Juniper claims the T640 and its new set of ASICs do not reorder packets. But competitor Avici Systems says there may be another architectural issue to consider with the T640.

Having 32 OC-192c interfaces packed into an eight-slot, half-rack chassis could cause the system to overheat, says Esmeralda Swartz, director of marketing for Avici.

"The Bellcore guidelines for power in a seven-foot rack is 6,000 watts. Two T640's in a rack equate to 13,000 watts. What good is being able to accommodate four OC-192's per (slot) and fully loading the T640, if the box overheats?" Swartz asks. "Carriers would not be able to fully populate T640 with line cards."

Dillon says Avici is referencing old, outdated and irrelevant information.

"Those Bellcore specs are quite dated and have not kept pace with technology," Dillion says. "The majority of the routers that are out there today do not adhere to those specs. For a given gigabit/sec capacity and a given comsumption of rack space, we're actually decreasing the amount of power and cooling that (service providers) need to deal with. This is not an issue."

Perhaps not, but others - such as sharply reduced capital spending among carriers and the widespread belief that there is a bandwidth glut in the core - are the reasons Juniper did not disclose any "name brand" Tier 1 carrier customers with the T640 announcement, competitors and analysts say. WorldCom was cited as a beta test reference, but Juniper says the carrier has not deployed the T640 in a production environment.

Aside from NTT/Verio, the three other customers for the product - France Telecom Research and Development, the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid Project and the Internet2 Abilene Network - are research facilities or institutions.

"The four customers announced with the T640 were not the large IXC/PTT type customers," says Nikos Theodosopoulos, senior analyst for Communications Equipment at UBS Warburg. "We continue to believe that there is also some customer transition risk involved due to a lack of a 'graceful' upgrade to the T640 for existing M160 customers."

Juniper takes issue with Warburg's assessment of the T640. "There are some pretty significant service providers endorsing this product today," Dillon counters. "And rather than ungraceful, this is the most graceful transition the industry's ever seen. It's one image of software that runs across the entire family. We have an unprecedented amount of interface reuse between the current platform and this new platform. Be careful with the Tier 1 issue: It's not a static situation, we are working with a number of other customers."