Hot chips from Juniper lift router performance dramatically

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 29 October 2009 09:01

Business IT - Technology

Juniper Networks has unveiled a new family of processors, Junos One, that will be embedded into a broad array of Juniper's future routing, switching and security products. It has also released new routers and router line cards incorporating the new chips, claiming dramatic performance improvements.

c The first Junos One chipset is the Junos Trio chipset with "revolutionary 3D Scaling technology that enables networks to scale dynamically for more bandwidth, subscribers and services – all at the same time without compromise," according to Juniper. The announcements were made along with others, including a rebranding, in what Juniper said was the biggest announcement in its 12 year history.

"Junos Trio with 3D Scaling is the only chipset of its kind on the planet," said Pradeep Sindhu, Juniper's founder, vice chairman and CTO. "This will dramatically change the economics for our customers, while helping them create new and better experiences for their customers. This is the platform for the next decade." He said that Juniper hand invested more than $US80 million over the last five years to develop Junos Trio.

It represents Juniper's fourth generation of purpose-built silicon, and is claimed to be incorporate industry's first "network instruction set" – billed as "a new silicon architecture unlike traditional application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and network processing units (NPUs)... that leverages customised 'network instructions' that are designed into silicon to maximise performance and functionality, while working closely with Junos [Juniper's network operating system used across all its products] to ensure programmability of network resources."

According to Juniper, "Junos Trio includes four chips with a total of 1.5 billion transistors and 320 simultaneous processes, yielding total router throughput up to 2.6Tbps and up to 2.3 million subscribers per rack – far exceeding the performance and scale possible through off-the-shelf silicon."

Juniper has released new MX80 routers and cards incorporating the new chipsets, claiming dramatic performance gains and very substantial leads over competing products.

Juniper claims that the new line cards and MX router combined: increase RoI over five years by up to 540 percent; reduce operating expenses for aggregation services up to 47 percent; reduce operating expenses for business services up to 63 percent; reduce operating expenses for residential services up to 77 percent and improve power efficiency by a factor of 10-to-1 versus other vendors. It says these figures have been "validated through a commissioned study conducted by an independent third party."

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