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Juniper unveils 'Gibson' core router

Next-generation Internet platform raises bar for 10G density, demonstrable terabit scale.

By Jim Duffy
The Edge, 04/29/02

SUNNYVALE, CALIF. - Juniper Networks last week unveiled its long-anticipated next-generation core router, a 640G bit/sec device that raises the bar in terms of 10G bit/sec density and is intended to scale to multiterabit throughput.

However, Juniper's T640, which has been commonly known as Gibson, includes upgrade requirements that may give carriers pause. Also, Juniper claims it can demonstrate the terabit routing capability of this device today, but the company won't say when it will be available in a future upgrade.

And the company's 10G bit/sec density advantage may be short-lived because a next-generation platform from Cisco is said to be on the horizon, perhaps in trials late this year.

Regardless, Gibson could give Juniper a kick-start in 10G bit/sec core routing. The company lost more than half of its share in the 80G bit/sec router market between 2000 and 2001 since Cisco began shipping OC-192c on its 12400 series a year ago, according to Dell'Oro Group.

In addition to Cisco's market entry, Juniper's market share slip could have been caused by deferred purchases of the company's M160 core router in anticipation of Gibson, a packet-misordering situation in OC-192c on the M160, or both. Juniper has corrected both situations.

The eight-slot, half-rack Gibson is shipping and running production traffic at NTT/Verio and France Telecom, and in two research networks. It includes new Juniper Internet Processor ASICs - the T-series - that are optimized for high-density 10G bit/sec: 32 OC-192c interfaces into a single chassis vs. eight for the M160, and 16 for Cisco's 12416 Internet Router; and 20 for Avici's Terabit Switch Router, which both occupy full racks.

Gibson also sports 128 OC-48c links, which are carried forward from the M160, and 128 Gigabit Ethernets interfaces.

The T-series ASICs, which perform more than four times as many route lookups per second as the M160, also do not reorder packets as they enter or exit the router. Keeping IP flows intact apparently alleviates the potential to misalign packets in a flow, which can disrupt communication. This situation exists in Juniper's OC-192c cards for the M160, but only under extreme and rare conditions, the vendor says. It did not significantly impact any customers, company officials say.

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But that also means OC-192c blades from the M160 are not forward-compatible to Gibson. Carriers requiring the horsepower of the new router will have to purchase not only a new chassis but also new 10G bit/sec line cards.

Some analysts say this will result in deferred purchases of Gibson as service providers try to negotiate with Juniper to get better pricing options for the upgrade.

"There is a customer-transition risk due to a lack of a 'graceful' upgrade to the T640 for existing M160 customers," says UBS Warburg Analyst Nikos Theodosopoulos in a recent report on Gibson. "While all of this should not be surprising to customers, it could cause some of the larger carriers some concerns given the current capex crunch. This could cause some customers to delay adopting this product and trying to possibly negotiate better financial terms to compensate for the lack of compatibility on the OC-192c line cards."

Other analysts didn't see the upgrade requirement as a deal breaker, but indicated that Gibson may be ahead of its time.

"It's not immediately necessary for service providers, but a good technology race [for Juniper] against Cisco," says Kevin Mitchell, directing analyst for service provider networks at Infonetics Research. "And service providers have to upgrade to gain additional density sometime, so it's either with Juniper or someone else."

That someone else could be Cisco. The vendor is working on its next-generation core router, referred to as the HFR, which is believed to sport 16 40G bit/sec-capable slots per chassis.

HFR also may present its own upgrade challenges as Cisco is said to be writing an entirely new operating system for this device. Cisco says it does not comment on "rumors" and, thus, did not deny the development of this new operating system.

Employing the math of vendor marketing officials - who double count packets - HFR is a 1.28T bit/sec single-chassis router. Cisco plans to link multiple chassis to achieve even greater scale, but this is something Juniper says it can demonstrate today and ship within a reasonable time frame to any carrier requiring it soon.

The Gibson rollout includes a switching matrix called TX that Juniper says can link eight or more T640s to achieve at least 5T bit/sec of nonblocking throughput. Juniper says it will demonstrate TX publicly May 22, but the vendor declined to divulge a release date for its commercial availability.

However, the need for that level of scale may not emerge until late 2003 and into 2004, says Kevin Dillon, director of portfolio marketing at Juniper.

Five switch fabric cards on the T640 have dedicated optical connections to the TX. A half-rack TX can link four T640s; a full-rack, eight.

These dedicated optical backplane extensions have hundreds of lasers that operate at 1.8G bit/sec, for a total throughput of 1.28T bit/sec for a single T640-to-TX local connection. Multiplying this by eight T640s achieves a greater than 10T bit/sec system, Juniper say.