Juniper Networks today announced availability of a new Internet core router that is four times faster than the company's previous generation offering.
The M160 Internet backbone router supports eight 10G bit/sec OC-192c circuits at wire-rate performance, Juniper says. The previous generation M40 is a wire-rate OC-48 router.
Each OC-192c interface on the M160 is a clear channel 10G bit/sec circuit, which means a fully-loaded M160 router can handle 160G bit/sec throughput at a forwarding rate of 160M packet/sec, Juniper claims.
The M160 is compatible with the M40 and Juniper's M20 edge router, and supports a range of interfaces, including OC-48c, OC-12c and OC-3 SONET ports, Gigabit Ethernet, OC-12 and OC-3 ATM, and channelized OC-12 and DS-3.
The M160 lets service providers provision multiple IP-based services such as Internet routing, multicast, Class-of-service queuing and Multi-protocol Label Switching signaling and traffic engineering for virtual private networks.
"Juniper is giving Cisco, Lucent and Nortel a run for their money at the core right now," says Craig Johnson, principal analyst at the PITA Group in Portland, Ore. "But it is still just a hot box sell at the right time for the product. They have to expand out from this play over time. Customers like to have competitors, no matter what they say about 'single sourcing.' Today's hot box company is tomorrow's commodity."
The M160 router is available immediately. An initial system configuration costs $125,000, with interfaces starting at $20,000.
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