Juniper intros control plane scaling platform

Juniper intros control plane scaling platform

Juniper control system 1200 accelerates service model innovation

Friday, March 07, 2008

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Juniper Networks, has advanced the economics of networking with the introduction of JCS 1200, Control Plane Scaling Platform. JCS 1200 introduces scale of control and forwarding plane resources to help maximize service growth, operational efficiencies and control

. This purpose-built control plane platform enables service providers to accelerate the roll out of high-value services, reduce capital and operating expenditures and deliver an outstanding customer experience.

As service providers seek to deliver multiple services concurrently across a converged IP infrastructure, each service must contend for a fixed amount of control plane capacity in the underlying routing infrastructure. The Juniper Networks JCS 1200 addresses this challenge by providing a standalone, dedicated platform for control plane resources (hosting multiple Routing Engines), which provides significantly enhanced scale, control and efficiency.

The scale and flexibility of the JCS 1200 enables greater network monetization based on its ability to enable innovative, quality, scalable services, affording service providers a significant competitive advantage.

“Research and education networks today need the ability to provide both production IP services for their users as well as dedicated experimental facilities for network research,” said Robert Vietzke, Internet2 executive director of network services.

“We are encouraged to see the development of innovative control plane products like Juniper’s JCS 1200 that could provide this type of network flexibility as well as scalability to meet additional capacity demands.”

Delivering the Next Evolution of Scale

Juniper pioneered the separation control and forwarding planes in 1998 with the introduction of the M40 core router, which distributed the control and forwarding functions to different processors within the physical router chassis without the intervention of software. This unique approach helped define carrier-class reliability and availability for IP infrastructure and set the standard in the networking industry for routing architectures.

Since then, the forwarding and control planes of routers have each scaled dramatically to keep pace with network traffic growth and service provider demand; however, individual routers are designed with a fixed amount of control plane resources, leaving providers with few options when faced with adding control plane capacity without sacrificing forwarding capacity. With JCS 1200, Juniper is introducing a new paradigm—the ability to scale the control plane independently in a separate, interconnected platform.

In today’s converged networks, the ability to maintain a high level of separation between services is critical to helping providers to ensure the service-specific quality, security and performance demanded by advanced applications such as IPTV.

Because JCS 1200 enables providers to scale control plane resources to existing, deployed T-series routers, providers can achieve this separation at groundbreaking scale and capacity through service-specific virtualization—the secure, flexible allocation of a single physical routing platform to multiple virtual routing instances.

Virtualization also enables providers to reduce operational and capital costs by consolidating network equipment and functions, streamlining management and administrative tasks and maximizing the utilization of, and investment in, existing resources.

Maximum Scale, Efficiency and Control

Building on Juniper’s pioneering work on the separation of control and forwarding planes, a modular operating system, and logical routers, the JCS 1200 is a 12 rack unit (RU) chassis that provides 12 Routing Engine slots and connects to Juniper Networks T-series routers via redundant Ethernet connections. The JCS 1200 delivers several distinct advantages:

·      Maximum Scale: The dedicated RE chassis eliminates the need to compromise expensive, revenue-generating router slots for control plane scaling—all 40G and 100G slots on the routers are preserved for forwarding. When used in conjunction with a T1600 router, JCS 1200 can create hardware-virtualized routers while delivering as much as three times the forwarding capacity of competitive systems—while using 25 percent less rack space.

·      Increased Efficiency and Investment Protection: JCS 1200 integrates seamlessly with existing T-series router deployments, helping to protect customers’ capital investment. By enabling service-specific virtualization, the JCS 1200 can improve network efficiency by consolidating equipment—studies have shown that using virtualization to maximize resource utilization can deliver substantial efficiency gains.

·      Greater Control for Rapid Service Roll Out: New services can be planned, tested, and deployed quickly, with far fewer resources and with a greatly accelerated time to market. By simplifying and shortening the pre-deployment testing process, the JCS can allow service providers to reduce time-to-market by several weeks or months, resulting in enhanced potential for accelerated revenue and customer growth.

“The ability to deliver new services quickly and cost-effectively is what helps service providers stay ahead of their competitors and deliver real value to their customers, and ultimately depends on the ability to scale the control plane,” said Michael Howard, principal analyst, Infonetics Research. “By separating the control plane, and so allowing it to scale independently, Juniper is helping providers speed service velocity, which directly helps them with competitive differentiation.”

The JCS 1200 leverages the powerful JUNOS software, a single-source operating system that offers a uniform set of features, consistent implementation, and universal configuration and management tools. From a management perspective, the routing engines in the JCS 1200 function identically to individual T-series routers, ensuring consistent and fast deployment, with no new training requirements.

“Enabling the control plane to scale independently of the forwarding plane is the next logical evolution of routing technologies, and we believe it will help providers accelerate the monetization of their networks by delivering innovative, quality, scalable services which set them apart from the crowd,” said Matt Kolon, Asia Pacific CTO for Juniper Networks. “Juniper is once again advancing the economics of networking by delivering the industry’s first control plane scaling platform, which delivers significantly enhanced capacity, efficiency and control, while reducing the costs and complexities associated with managing today’s converged IP infrastructures.”

The JCS 1200 Control Plane Scaling Platform is expected to be generally available for deployment in Q2 2008.

©CIOL Bureau