Juniper aims to virtualize the IP core

“You can create a private [content delivery network] for content owners -- a ‘Google-net,’ a ‘Facebook-net,’ with the same QoS as the traffic in their own walled gardens,” Ceuppens said.

“Just as virtualization and the intelligent partitioning of resources has become the standard for optimizing data center resources, network virtualization will bring a new dimension of flexibility and scalability to the network infrastructure,” Ray Mota, an analyst with Synergy Research Group, said in a statement released through Juniper. “With the announcement today, Juniper is leading the way in this important area, enabling customers to streamline asset utilization with hardware logical routers partitioned at the line card level.”

As part of the new platform, Juniper is also introducing integrated optics for its T-1600 and T640 core routers, following a move made years ago by Cisco Systems dubbed IP-over-DWDM [dense wavelength division multiplexing]. Though IPoDWDM has been deployed by carriers such as Comcast and Sprint, critics of the architecture say the savings in short-reach interface may not be enough to overshadow the operational changes required to combine optical and routing network management – two historically separate groups – as well as other shortcomings.

But Juniper argues that those short-reach interfaces become more expensive as interface capacities soar to 100 Gb/s. And with visibility into the optical network, the vendor said, routers may even be able to route around fiber breaks as they happen. “When a fiber ruptures, it takes between one second and longer before the cable breaks,” Ceuppens said. “It stretches first. During that period, the optical signal-to-noise ratio and bit error rates deteriorate very fast. The IP layer starts noticing that, which gives it more time to reroute, which improves the service quality of users impacted.”

Though Juniper is making optical interfaces available now, the company is currently talking with optical equipment vendors about partnering for optical/router integration, perhaps with the optical vendor contracting with Juniper to manage the optical link.

“No optical vendor wants to partner with router vendors and lose [money], but at least Juniper is trying to make a 'deal' with those vendors so they don't lose out,” IDC’s Griliches said in an email. “It has benefits in short-reach connections at high bandwidth, so the market won't go away. But I believe most optical vendors will not partner on this for a while unless pretty desperate. It can be a big savings if done right; it's just that Cisco's version was not cost-effective to carriers. We'll see this work if the two partners are very strong. To date (with Cisco and Nortel), that hasn't been the case.”