Juniper ready to pop Pepsi

Juniper next week will announce the J-Series of enterprise access routers, otherwise known by the code name “Pepsi,” according to sources.

The J-Series consists of three models, all featuring two Fast Ethernet ports. The 2300 is a 8M bit/sec device with two WAN ports. The 4300 is a 16M bit/sec router with six WAN ports; and the 6300 is a 90M bit/sec device also with six WAN ports.

Contrary to previous reports, the J-Series will not initially feature any integrated security technology from Juniper’s recent acquisition of NetScreen. VPN, firewall and intrusion detection capabilities have been developed by Juniper, sources say.

Juniper said it would not comment on "rumors."

At initial release the routers will run a version of JUNOS 6.4 that has had hardware-specific code for Juniper’s higher end M- and T-Series routers removed.

Each router will have one base system processor with an additional processor on every I/O card for scale and adding features and functions. The software for the forwarding and control planes are separate and are distributed across the main processor and the I/O processors, sources say.

Juniper will resell the J-Series routers through service providers as components of managed service offerings, and through other channel resellers when they ship in the third or fourth quarter. Pricing could not be learned by press time.

The routers are expected to compete with Cisco’s 1700, 2600/2700 and 3600/3700 series routers.

The J-Series routers are part of Juniper’s plan to invade Cisco’s enterprise turf to fill out its Infranet Initiative plan, a strategy to coalesce the industry around standards for making the Internet a business-viable network. The $4 billion acquisition of NetScreen early this year was a clear sign that Juniper had backed away from its pledge not to play in the enterprise market where it may compete with its service provider customers.

And some believe that Juniper will make another significant acquisition of an enterprise player, perhaps Ethernet LAN switch vendor Extreme Networks.