Juniper Targets Cisco With Multi-Chassis Core Router

Juniper Networks on Friday (Dec. 3) announced availability of its TX Matrix platform, a piece of hardware that can connect up to four of the company's high-end routers to provide higher throughput and simpler management for its largest service-provider customers.

While the company's multi-chassis offering may seem to offer far lower throughput than main competitor Cisco Systems' latest top router, Juniper said its new product gives service providers and large enterprises a simpler, cheaper and more straightforward path to scaling their backbone networks.

"We want to provide the most amount of capacity in the least amount of [physical] footprint," said Tom Jacobs, senior product manager for Juniper's core router division. The TX Matrix, Juniper said, is contained in a two-thirds-height, 19-inch rack chassis, and uses the same JUNOS operating system as the company's entire router line.

The switching and routing elements in the TX Matrix can connect up to four of Juniper's T640 routers, allowing the configuration to act as a single router, easing administration and increasing reliability. Base pricing for the TX Matrix starts at $175,000, and could range as high as $1 million, depending on the configuration, Juniper said.

Cisco's CRS-1, does offer potentially greater throughput than the TX Matrix's advertised 2.56 Terabits-per-second rate since it can link together more routing chassis. But Cisco's offering also uses a new operating system and is housed in a wider, taller cabinet, which might scare off potential users who don't want to radically alter their infrastructures."It [the TX Matrix strategy] is philosophically different from Cisco," Jacobs said.

So far, customers in the service provider market are literally buying Juniper's philosophy, according to recent statistics that show Juniper's share of the core router market growing faster than Cisco's. Cisco's CRS-1, which starts at a price of $450,000, has not generated much heat in the market, with some observers claiming it was too much, too soon for financially strapped service providers.

While Juniper's Jacobs said that multi-chassis routers are becoming a standard part of emerging RFPs, in truth they currently only fit "in the largest of service providers, in the largest locations," he said. "I don't think there's a POP on earth that could consume all the bandwidth we offer today."

But, Jacobs conceded, it probably won't be "too far down the road" before such high throughput is required in more locations, given the historic growth in networked traffic.

"But customers have told us that real estate is at a premium," Jacobs said. "We feel like we can deliver [what carriers want] in a fraction of the footprint [than Cisco]."0