Earlier this year, Cisco promised to "transform the internet", though its launch turned out to be no more than a giant core router, the CRS-3. Now Juniper has unveiled the T4000, which it claims can achieve twice the capacity of the Cisco product and take it firmly into the carrier market.
The T4000 boasts capacity of 240 Gbps per slot, or 4 Tbps per half-rack chassis, which would be used to handle the burgeoning levels of data traffic on carrier networks ?with video and wireless being the chief sources of that growth. The new router is based on ASIC chips that Juniper introduced in February and offers twice the port density of the CRS-3 or other competitors, Juniper says. It features over two billion packets per second of forwarding performance. The CRS-3 is a full-rack system with 4.48 Tbps switching capacity and 140 Gbps per slot.
The main core router vendors are Cisco, Juniper and Huawei, which between them account for 97% of total revenues, according to researchers at dell'Oro. Smaller suppliers are trying to muscle in ?Brocade recently launched a high-end Ethernet router, looking to expand from its enterprise base. But Cisco is complacent about its lead ?it says the CRS-3 has 30 customers and $50 million in booked revenue already.
"It's their response to us," Mike Capuano, Cisco's director of service provider marketing, told NetworkWorld. "They already announced the 250 Gbps chipset. The CRS-3 is current shipping. They wanted to get the news out early to slow that [CRS-3] down." Juniper admits its router will not ship until the second half of 2011.
Tom Nolle, president of consultancy CIMI, thinks the sweet spot for the T4000 may be mobile broadband, especially as Cisco is likely to have upgraded the raw capacity of CRS-3 by the latter part of next year. "This is a strong product for mobile broadband," he said, routing closer to the subscriber in order to reduce backhaul requirements. He thinks this, and metro routing where traffic does not leave the metrozone, will be the best bet for Juniper because of its new product's density, small footprint, and power requirements.
But Juniper insists the core is the key target, and it will upgrade its TX Matrix Plus router interconnect so it can cluster four T4000s into one 16 Tbps system. It will also allow carriers to cluster T4000s with current T1600 models.