Juniper 100GE interface leaves Cisco behind

BANGALORE, INDIA: Digital world is expanding like never before and India is no exception. The country, which is one of the fastest growing telecom markets in the world, will soon see a high demand for higher bandwidth applications with the advent of 3G.

Thus, the networking world is heading towards saturation owing to high Ethernet traffic and service providers are looking at a 'shrinking' growth.

Higher application has always been inevitable, it has just been a question of when and Juniper has answered the call. Only recently did the industry saw the entry of 10Gbit Ethernet cards. And now, Juniper has gone all the way to bring the industry's first 100 gigabit (100 GE) router interface card for its T1600 core router.

Animesh K Sahay, head, Telecom Business, India and SAARC, Juniper Networks, speaks to CIOL on this behalf. Excerpts:

CIOL: Trends say, 10Gbit Ethernet is still relatively in the early stages of adoption. So who will be the takers for 100GE cards?

Animesh K Sahay: The exponential rise in demand for telecom services in India, spurred by increased penetration of mobile services, is saturating networks. Adoption of data services and the advent of 3G are also driving the need for faster and more efficient service provider networks.

Adopting 100G would give service providers a definite edge over the others, as it is a long-term solution that addresses future needs. Juniper believes that the largest Tier-1 service providers will be the first ones to deploy the solution.

CIOL: What will drive this demand?

AS: As per the Cellular Operators Association of India, the total number of GSM subscriptions in India reached 306.4 million in May. As of June 1, 2009, India also has 100 million CDMA subscribers.

These figures indicate the increasing growth of mobile services. Broadband penetration, too, shows promising growth. Increased demand from subscribers for greater speeds and increased reliability will drive service providers to offer high-bandwidth solutions.

At the same time, despite additions to the base of users, ARPUs are declining. This, and the economic crunch, means that service providers are constantly looking for ways to lower total cost of operations. The 100GE interface substantially improves operating efficiency, helping SPs to achieve this.

The continued rise of Ethernet traffic in the metro and the access networks naturally means that more Ethernet is running through the core of service provider networks. Currently, the fastest Ethernet interface is 10 GE links.

Faster speeds can be achieved by aggregating multiple 10 GE links, but this is only a good stopgap solution. The 100 GE interface is the ideal long-term solution to meet the growing needs of high-speed networks.

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.