Router newcomers take on Cisco, Juniper

With their souped-up engines and buckets of cash, two new router players debuted this week with ambitious plans to break the two-headed tyranny of Cisco and Juniper.

Procket Networks and Caspian Networks feel they can sway service providers now beholden to Cisco and Juniper to their wares, built, they say, from the ground up to accommodate the millions of hosts and astounding growth of the Internet. Through financial incentives and the stability of their own funding, Procket and Caspian feel they have a good shot at grabbing some mind and market share.

Procket, which has raised close to $300 million in four years, unveiled programmable products and a portability plan designed to put its routing smarts on the platforms of some influential and symbiotic partners.

The company's PRO/8000 series of routers includes the PRO/8801 and the PRO/8812. The line supports a range of interfaces, from OC-3c to Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet and OC-192c.  The half-rack PRO/8812 core router is the showcase of the line, featuring 960G bit/sec of total capacity and a 1.2 billion packet/sec forwarding rate.

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With their souped-up engines and buckets of cash, two new router players debuted this week with ambitious plans to break the two-headed tyranny of Cisco and Juniper.

Procket Networks and Caspian Networks feel they can sway service providers now beholden to Cisco and Juniper to their wares, built, they say, from the ground up to accommodate the millions of hosts and astounding growth of the Internet. Through financial incentives and the stability of their own funding, Procket and Caspian feel they have a good shot at grabbing some mind and market share.

Procket, which has raised close to $300 million in four years, unveiled programmable products and a portability plan designed to put its routing smarts on the platforms of some influential and symbiotic partners.

The company's PRO/8000 series of routers includes the PRO/8801 and the PRO/8812. The line supports a range of interfaces, from OC-3c to Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet and OC-192c.  The half-rack PRO/8812 core router is the showcase of the line, featuring 960G bit/sec of total capacity and a 1.2 billion packet/sec forwarding rate.

This compares to 640G bit/sec for Juniper's T640 and 160G bit/sec for Cisco's 12416 in full-rack configurations.

All PRO/8812 chassis are designed to be clustered for scale, Procket says.

Procket says these densities are attainable via its custom very large scale integration chips, which are designed in-house. These chips are programmable, which means they can support new features through software downloads rather than requiring the hardware upgrade of ASICs, Procket says. 

Procket's chips include a 40G bit/sec processor, a terabit-capable switch fabric, and a single chipset that can scale from 80G bit/sec to 960G bit/sec, the company claims.

Procket's software - the PRO/1 Modular Service Environment - is platform-independent code based on a lightweight, real-time kernel, and modular in nature so IP software upgrades can be performed without interrupting network operation. The software also includes a "system manager" to enable self-monitoring, correcting, configuring, and protection features for automatic recovery, Procket claims.

A big part of Procket's strategy is to license PRO/1 to strategic partners to enable new applications - such as blade server virtualization and low-end enterprise routing. The company says it already has “significant engagements” with big server vendors, among others.

Procket hopes the licensing strategy will attract buyers who feel Cisco’s software is old and unwieldy, and Juniper’s has already been surpassed by the growth of the Internet.

“Customers are tired of the fact that they have to continually upgrade,” Procket CEO Randall Kruep says. “They’re sick of all the churn. They’re tired of all the software stability issues, and the 25 to 30 different versions” of the same code.

Caspian also has raised close to $300 million in four years, and has an aggressive incentive program to entice carriers to consider its Apeiro “flow-based” router.