SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Juniper Networks Inc. is completing its own grand unification theory that unites its Mxx and Txx series of core routers with the ERX edge router acquired with Unisphere Networks Inc. Sweep away the ambitious program name of Mint (Model for Integrated Network Transformation), and the project represents a decoupling of bit-level transport from service provisioning.
Both Juniper and Unisphere were experimenting with such concepts before they merged earlier this year. But the completion of the router melding calls for the debut of dedicated quality-of-service (QoS) and asynchronous transfer mode cards for the Juniper M series, as well as new software to expand support of Internet Protocol version 6 and Open Shortest Path First routing in the Mxx, Txx and ERX platforms.
Karen Livoli, router marketing manager at Juniper, said features such as encryption, packet queuing, packet shaping and virtual private network (VPN) tunneling now form a "service tool kit" that will be invoked in identical fashion across all Juniper router architectures. Central to the implementation of services will be multiprotocol label-switching (MPLS) software, including the Martini and Kompella extensions, which will become the lingua franca for QoS and VPN features in the future.
Juniper is resuscitating the automated service-provisioning concept at a lucky time for the company. Two of the edge-routing specialists that planned to revolutionize the field in the late 1990s — Shasta Networks and Spring Tide Networks — became targets of acquisition (Shasta by Nortel and Spring Tide by Lucent), and their technology essentially has disappeared. That leaves Cisco Systems and Redback Networks as competitors in provisioning, though Juniper continues to watch software from the likes of Alcatel and Ciena.
Underserved markets
The target, Livoli said, is the significant percentage of commercial and consumer customers for whom provisioning of service is too costly for carriers to consider. The problem is most serious in the small- to midsize-business market, as well as in the home office realm, where many customers are offered little choice but dedicated T1 or 56-kbit lines. Livoli cited CIMI Corp. figures suggesting that the underserved small-business market represented $25 billion in lost revenue for carriers since 1998, a figure that is estimated to be growing by some $7 billion to $8 billion annually.
Automating this service provisioning has kept ATM popular, since the cell-switching technology makes it comparatively easy to provision virtual circuits. Juniper is rolling an ATM2 physical interface card (PIC) that lets the Juniper M series map Layer 2 VPNs to specific services (already implemented in ERX routers).
The ATM hardware is rolling out in tandem with IPv6 software, in which IPv6 is introduced as a service over MPLS backbones. While Asia has been interested in IPv6 due to address-space exhaustion, Livoli said that North American and European customers finally are starting to move from IPv4 to IPv6, following several quarters of fence-sitting. Using a common MPLS transport mechanism helps to ease the transition to IPv6, she said.
The final step for the M and T core routers is the addition of the ASIC-based Q Performance Processor, to let line cards support fine-grained queuing and dense channelization.
Juniper plans to expand ties with operation-support system and specialty-software tool kit vendors next year to create a policy environment that maps user requests to the unified service tool kit.
