Juniper’s Converged Supercore Solution: What It Means for Service Providers

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Yesterday at Juniper’s Financial Analyst Meeting in San Francisco, our founder and CTO, Pradeep Sindhu, and Stefan Dyckerhoff, the Executive Vice President of our Platform Systems Group, announced the industry’s first Converged Supercore, with both the PTX Series Packet Transport Switch and the Junos Express chipset, which simplify and greatly improve the economics for  service and content providers.

Disruptive innovation to solve our customer’s toughest challenges has always been Juniper’s hallmark. As IP traffic skyrockets and becomes more dynamic, the challenge for service providers lies directly at the core of their network. The traditional three-layer architecture – optical, circuit switching, and IP/MPLS – can no longer adequately or economically accommodate increased traffic demands. As ACG Research analyst Ray Mota pointed out yesterday, throwing “band-aid” solutions like more hardware and bandwidth at the problem is both costly and unsustainable in the face of exponential traffic growth. 

Yesterday, we also spoke about transport networks being at an inflection point. The core of the network requires packet-based end-to-end transport solutions combined with a single operating system supporting both optical and packet layers. Yesterday’s panel participants – Pradeep, Clemson professor Dr. Pietro Belotti, NTT Communications senior director Kempei Fukuda, and Ray Mota – all emphasized that an integrated MPLS-switched core is an ideal solution to handle present and future traffic demands.

Fukuda-san pointed out that for NTT, as both an Internet provider and a telco, quality of service is paramount and therefore severely impeded by latency within the multiple layers in the core of the network. Professor Belotti discussed his statistical model showing that an integrated MPLS solution is 40 – 65% less expensive (in capex) alone than OTN switching. All agreed that architectural transition for the transport network is inevitable given that current circuit-based switching does not dynamically address the growth or variability of IP traffic demand.

Several audience members were curious about whether the Converged Supercore will cannibalize our T-Series product. As Ray Mota noted, the core router market actually grew more than 19 percent in Q4’10 and service providers like NTT are likely to move core IP routing technologies further to the edge as they create a supercore.

Powered by the Junos OS, Juniper’s PTX Series switch is blazing ahead of the competition to consolidate optical transport and packet switching and significantly reduce opex and capex costs for service providers. The Junos Express chipset, the industry’s fastest and most energy efficient silicon, will power the PTX Series with up to two terabits per slot, more than four times the speed and five times the packet processing capability of any competitor core platform.

Today, there is resounding agreement across the industry that Juniper’s Converged Supercore uniquely addresses the real challenges service providers are facing. As Stefan concluded, the true value of the solution ties directly to Juniper’s disruptive innovation principles: simplicity combined with an open software framework that addresses scale, performance, and efficiency issues while improving economics. Stay tuned for more news on our Converged Supercore in the coming weeks and months!

All Juniper Networks product related information and comparisons are based on internal testing results, publicly available information regarding competitive offerings and in some cases, industry standards.