Hot chips from Juniper lift router performance dramatically

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 29 October 2009 09:01

Business IT - Technology

According to Wendy Cartee,  head of product and technical marketing for Edge and Aggregation Business Unit at Juniper Networks, "We have compared the best silicon available today across multiple competitors and we can achieve twice the packet capacity, twice the packet handling capability and three times the address handling capability. The trio can provide these using less power than the best silicon on the market today. It is two times more power efficient."

The announced products are:
- Two new MX Series 3D routers - billed as "the industry's most powerful 3.5-inch routers (eight times faster than competitors) designed for delivering carrier ethernet services for multi-tenant buildings, as well as mobile aggregation, video and enterprise edge deployments."

Cartee claimed eight competitor's products would be needed to achieve equivalent performance to the new MX80s.

The new modular line cards for new or existing MX routers are:
- The MX 3D Aggregation Line Card, billed as "the industry's first 120 Gbps card with highest 10GE density for aggregation, video distribution, data centre and edge routing;"
- The MX 3D Universal Edge Line Card, claimed to offer "dramatic experience improvement and pay-as-you-grow economics based on a flexible GE / 10GE configuration;"
- The MX 3D 100GbE Line Card billed as "The industry's only edge routing with line-rate 100GbE performance for edge uplink, inter-data centre and high-bandwidth aggregation."

When used in Juniper's highest performing  MX router, the MX960, Cartee said they would lift its throughput to 2.4tbps, representing  "a dramatic improvement in the use of space, power and cooling for service providers...This represents the highest capacity [edge] router in the industry."

She claimed that four of the Juniper's leading competitor's routers would be needed to achieve the same performance, and that the MX960 with the new line cards, "uses 90 percent less power than the two leading competing products."

Juniper's MX 3D products are available starting December 2009 with MX 3D Aggregation Line Card. The other products will be available throughout 2010.

Stuart Corner travelled to New York for Juniper's announcement as a guest of the company.