Juniper fortifies edge

Juniper Networks this week unveiled an edge router designed to meld Layer 2 services, such as frame relay and ATM, with an IP/MPLS backbone.

Juniper also rolled out a software toolkit to allow service providers to write applications for frame relay and ATM service emulation. The toolkit, called J-FASE, also fosters interoperability with Lucent's frame relay and ATM switches.

Juniper and Lucent have an alliance centered around migrating Lucent's installed base of frame relay and ATM customers to MPLS cores.

The M320 Multiservice Edge Platform is designed to consolidate points of presence by replacing legacy routers. It pushes Juniper's two-year-old M40e edge router farther out into smaller POPs.

The M320 incorporates a new routing engine, the 1.6 GHz/2G DRAM RE1600, which is designed to support thousands of VPNs and customer interfaces. The router sports a forwarding rate of 385M packet/sec and a switching capacity of 320G bit/sec.

Interface densities are 16xOC-192, 16x10G Ethernet, 64xOC-48, 128xOC-3/12, 160x1G bit/sec Ethernet and "thousands" of DS-1s, DS-0s and logical interfaces. The M320 also supports eight queues per logical interface for QoS.

The M320 supports metro Ethernet services like VPLS, per-VLAN QoS and stacked VLANs, as well as translational cross-connect, a Juniper-developed feature for ATM/frame relay-to-Ethernet interworking.

J-FASE includes capabilities such as DiffServ-aware MPLS Traffic Engineering and Connection Admission Control for guaranteed bandwidth across IP/MPLS networks. It also includes operations, administration and maintenance tools to enable providers to assure service-level agreements.