Juniper offers telco-grade 10GbE router

Powerful 10 Gigabit Ethernet router could appeal to large corporates

Juniper Networks has launched its telco-grade M120 Multiservice Edge Router, which may also appeal to other enterprises needing a high-performance WAN gateway system to support voice, video and data.

“This platform has a predominant focus on the service provider market, but we think it will also appeal to some large enterprises wishing to build their own backbone or datacentre facilities,” said Juniper’s EMEA director of service provider marketing, Paul Gainham.

Gainham added, “It’s effectively a quarter-rack-size system, so this would save rack space, but still be a powerful 10 gigabit-capable IP MPLS [Multiprotocol Label Switching] routing platform.”

Juniper said the M120 could function as either a headquarters gateway router or as a datacentre router, allowing distributed enterprises to utilise MPLS in conjunction with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPNs to give consistent quality of service for voice, video and data links for branch offices.

One of the key attractions of the platform may be its high-availability features. “From a hardware perspective, we’ve introduced line card redundancy, giving us six-nines redundancy for the core hardware,” said Gainham. “From a physical perspective, the M120 supports up to 128 Gigabit Ethernet ports, but can support around 50 to 60,000 logical interfaces, giving a highly scalable platform.”

The M120 uses Juniper’s Junos firmware based on its application specific integrated circuit (Asic) called the I-chip. Gainham said the M120 Multiservice Edge Router would be available in September, when pricing would be announced.