Juniper last week launched a switching matrix for interconnecting multiple high-end carrier routers into a multiterabit-capable system designed to accommodate more service subscribers.

Juniper’s TX Matrix, which was first introduced more than two years ago along with the company’s T-series core routers, raises the stakes once again in this hotly contested market. Juniper made significant market-share gains at Cisco’s expense in the third quarter, despite the introduction of Cisco’s ultra-high-end and highly anticipated CRS-1 core router in May.

Although the systems are sold to carriers and services providers, core routers are meaningful to enterprise customers in terms of enabling service-level guarantees. Interconnecting core routers enables scale and higher performance, which lets service providers accommodate more subscribers and help ensure service availability.

“By increasing the size of the core, it would give [service providers] more overhead to be able to offer more services with a known guarantee,” says Jeff Ogle, an analyst at Current Analysis. “For the enterprise, you know you’d be safe to turn on filtering or other security features without grossly eating into the throughput of your core backbone.”

The TX is a five-slot chassis that fits into a 19-inch telco rack. It holds modules that each support four optical interconnections to a single T640 router for data and control plane redundancy.

Each TX requires five optical connections to a T640. The matrix can therefore connect four T640s at 2.5T bit/sec and 3 billion packet/sec forwarding, which is half the capacity Juniper first quoted for the system when it was introduced - eight T640s at 5T bit/sec. Juniper now says eight T640s at 5T bit/sec was at the extreme end of its expectations and that a single TX eventually will support more than eight T640s.

As an indication of its potential, T-series product manager Tom Jacobs says one TX now can support 64 T-series packet-forwarding engines (PFE). Juniper has plans to scale that to more than 1,000 PFEs per TX, he says.

Carriers can wait, according to Current Analysis’ Ogle. They’re currently not going much beyond 1T bit/sec.

T640 routers can be connected to the TX Matrix at distances of up to 328 feet, allowing for both local and distributed deployments, Juniper says. It runs Juniper’s Junos operating system software with high-availability features such as Graceful Routing Engine Switchover, In-service Software Upgrades and Bi-directional Forwarding Detection.