Almost all the major carriers of India have started discussion and are planning their network around 100GE cards for the future. We expect very quick adoption of this in the country, as soon as the cards are commercially available.

CIOL: Cisco had tested a 100Gbit/sec interface for its CRS-1 router a year back. So how can Junipers' become the industry's first?

AS: Juniper will be launching a fully compliant solution tied to the 802.3ba standard that can perform 100 Gbps forwarding even for the smallest size packets. We are not aware of another vendor who can demonstrate this capability.

The Cisco test only demonstrated the 100 Gbps of a Stratalight transponder shelf, as well as the aggregation (across 2 line cards) of 8 x 10 GE interfaces. The physical interface between CRS-1 and the StrataLight shelf was ribbonized multimode fiber, which would never be used in a real-world scenario.

CIOL: How is Juniper's 100 GE interface different from Cisco's?

AS: The 100 GE interface will be simple to configure and manage and is the ideal long-term solution to meet the high bandwidth needs of the network.

Aggregating ten 10 GE links in an LAG solution using hashing to load-balance the flows requires that the maximum flow be 10 Gbps. Load balancing on Layer 3 would use equal cost multipath.

With a significant increase in per-link capacity, Juniper's 100 GE interface card will enable service providers and data centers to reduce the number of interfaces required in their networks, yielding significant gains in simplified topologies and enhanced operational efficiencies – helping to lower total cost of ownership.

100 GE will help wireless and wireline service providers, cloud builders and data centers fully realize the promise of virtualization to consolidate resources, improve efficiency and drive down costs.

CIOL: When will the product be launched? What would it be priced at?

AS: We are planning to have the 100GE in customer test networks before the end of the year. The standards (IEEE 802.3ba) will be published around January 2010. The interface is fully compliant with the IEEE 802.3ba standards.

At this time we are qualifying the solution only on Juniper equipment. Currently there are no other 100 GE solutions in the market for interoperability testing.

Juniper is planning on general availability of the 100 GE interface to be sometime in the first half of 2010. We do not have a price yet. However, the 100 GE interface will be priced lower than 10 x 10 GE interfaces.