Juniper takes wraps off new networking products

Juniper Networks

Juniper Networks has held an event in New York to make several announcements, from software to chipsets, as well as outlining its new future-friendly focus of openness and partnerships.

In the board room of the New York Stock Exchange, the company held a conference attended by IT PRO with its top executives to detail the new products it is bringing to market.

First up was chief technology officer and founder of the company Pradeep Sindhu who described the new chipset Trio, part of the Junos One family.

"Its not surprising the first package networking used general purpose processors," he said, "[but] as more and more people started to use the network, the performance of the network outpaced performance of general purpose silicon."

"We have gone throw six generations of development to get to this chip," he added.

Trio consists of four chips designed for different purposes.

The first, the look up engine, was considered by Sindhu as "the brains of the chipset" designed for microprocessing. He claimed this is almost 20 times more efficient that "any other networking chipset on the planet" and is backed up by the memory in the second chip, the memory engine considered as the "brawn."

The queueing engine is the third chip to be announced which divides up the bandwidth in a granular way enabling customers to run applications without interruption.

Finally comes the interface engine which is a chip focused to work with Ethernet connectivity.

The new products shipping with the chips were also announced.

Kim Perdikou, executive vice president and general manager for infrastructure of products group, introduced both the larger scale MX 3D and what she called the "baby product," the MX80.

"It all starts at the edge of the network," she said."What we have today in the market - MX range have been very successful but we are going to take it to a whole new level."

Perdikou claimed that the MX 3D delivered the largest capacity edge router in the industry today at 2.6TB, whereas the MX80 is a modest 80GB product.

"Return of investment is 540 per cent higher with an MX 3D than it is with the next best competitor [and] total cost or ownership can be from 47 per cent to 77 per cent lower," she said.

She added: "Green is a must have stake of the new network and if we look at the MX 3D is uses a 10th of the power [compared to previous models]."

These should be shipping by December. Juniper also said other products featuring the new chipsets are in the pipeline, but remained tight-lipped when it came to specifics.

Mike Harding, vice president and general manager of Junos Space then delved into the promise made by the company's chief executive Kevin Johnson of opening up the Juniper platform.

"The new network is not just a network but a development platform open for businesses," he said. "Working with partners, we believe there is an opportunity to extend innovation across the whole network infrastructure."

In addition to Junos Space, an applications platform that the company wants to open up to other developers to add to its catalogue, Juniper has launched Juno Pulse as an integrated management system for the applications.

The company also announced three new applications. The Ethernet activator claims to offer a much better throughput of 10 times previous products, especially for service providers.

The Route Analyser tracks all the traffic that goes through a router and turns it into an information service for the user. Finally, Service Now helps identify any technical problems within the network and pushes that information to the user straight away, reducing downtime.

The final announcement was new partnerships with both Dell and Blade Network Technologies who will provide these new services to a wider range of customers.

Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.