Router newcomers take on Cisco, Juniper

Procket, Caspian push megarouters that offer increased stability, reliability, capacity.

With their souped-up engines and buckets of cash, two new router players debuted their product plans last week in an effort to break the two-headed tyranny of Cisco and Juniper.

Procket Networks and Caspian Networks officials say they can sway service providers now beholden to Cisco and Juniper to their own IP core routers, built from the ground up to accommodate the millions of hosts and astounding Internet growth.

They say their megarouters will bring a heretofore-unattainable level of stability and reliability to IP services such that companies mulling a managed VPN, voice-over-IP or storage service might now be ready to purchase.

Procket, which has managed to keep its product plans under cover despite raising close to $300 million in funding over four years, unveiled programmable products and a portability plan designed to put its routing smarts on the platforms of some influential and symbiotic partners.

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With their souped-up engines and buckets of cash, two new router players debuted their product plans last week in an effort to break the two-headed tyranny of Cisco and Juniper.

Procket Networks and Caspian Networks officials say they can sway service providers now beholden to Cisco and Juniper to their own IP core routers, built from the ground up to accommodate the millions of hosts and astounding Internet growth.

They say their megarouters will bring a heretofore-unattainable level of stability and reliability to IP services such that companies mulling a managed VPN, voice-over-IP or storage service might now be ready to purchase.

Procket, which has managed to keep its product plans under cover despite raising close to $300 million in funding over four years, unveiled programmable products and a portability plan designed to put its routing smarts on the platforms of some influential and symbiotic partners.

Procket's Pro/8800 series of routers support a range of interfaces from OC-3c (155M bit/sec) to Gigabit Ethernet, 10G Ethernet and OC-192c (10G bit/sec). 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 in a full-rack configuration.

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

Procket says it can achieve great density in its products via large-scale integration chips of its own design. These chips are programmable, meaning they can support new features through software downloads rather than requiring the hardware upgrade of ASICs, Procket says.

A big part of Procket's strategy is to license its software - the Pro/1 Modular Service Environment - to strategic partners to enable new applications, such as blade server virtualization and low-end enterprise routing. The company says it has "significant engagements" with undisclosed big server vendors, among others.

Procket officials say they hope the licensing strategy will attract buyers who feel Cisco's software is old and unwieldy, and Juniper's already has been surpassed by the growth of the Internet.

"Customers are tired that they have to continually upgrade," says Procket CEO Randall Kruep. "They're tired of all the software stability issues and the 25 to 30 different versions" of the same code.

Caspian unveiled

While Procket quietly has plotted its debut, Caspian has been more visible, trotting out company founder and Internet pioneer Larry Roberts on numerous occasions, most often to emphasize that Internet traffic still is growing briskly.

Caspian, which raised close to $300 million in funding over four years, will attempt to help carriers cope with that traffic via its Apeiro flow-based router.

Heavy hitters Procket and Caspian founders have distinguished roots.   Procket Chief Scientist Tony Li was distinguished engineer and project lead at Juniper Networks. Li has been quoted as saying that, as Juniper’s fifth employee, he arrived too late to influence long-term technology development. Li was also a technical lead at Cisco, where he helped initiate development of the 12000 series Internet router. Li also helped design and document the BGP 4 routing protocol. CTO Bill Lynch served as the lead architect for UltraSPARC-IV, Sun’s high-performance microprocessor. He joined Sun in 1992, where he invented SAM caches, a key component of the UltraSPARC-III microprocessor.     Caspian Vice chairman and CTO Larry Roberts is considered one of the four fathers of the Internet. He led the team that designed and developed ARPANet, the world’s first computer packet network, in 1966. Roberts also founded the first packet data communications carrier, Telenet, which subsequently became the data division of Sprint. President, CEO and Chairman Bill Krause may be best-known for his role as president and CEO of 3Com through the company’s high-growth years in the 1980s. At that time, 3Com grew from a venture capital funded start-up to become a $600 million publicly traded data networking company with operations worldwide. Krause also spent 14 years at HP with overall responsibility for the company’s pc business. Just before joining Caspian, Krause was CEO and president of Internet outsourcing firm Exodus Communications, which was purchased by Cable & Wireless.

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The offering is a modular, multishelf system that scales from 120G bit/sec of I/O per 1/3-rack shelf to 360G bit/sec per rack. Twelve of Apeiro's 17 slots are for line cards; the other five house shelf supervisor, switch fabric and application - or route - processor cards. Four switch fabric cards per shelf can be deployed for redundancy and load sharing.