Juniper offers external control plane

Juniper’s new JCS designed to scale control planes

Juniper Networks is offering a new device to help scale control planes for its existing routers.

The new JCS 1200, available in the second quarter, is a control plane platform that provides the intelligence for other routers without the forwarding or data plane elements that carry out the work of transporting traffic.

Whereas most routers include two routing engines (a master and a backup), the 1200 includes 12, which can be divided among a variety of services on other routers.

“If you think of having a master and a backup, it’s six times the control plane resources [of a typical router],” said Alan Sardella, Juniper’s senior product marketing manager for high-end systems.

The system is designed to allow carriers to scale services by offloading the complexity of control plane management to a discrete device that is designed solely for that purpose rather than just continuing to add routers. Because the JCS doesn’t include the expensive data plane interfaces that typical routers do, it’s not nearly as expensive as a typical router, Juniper said.

“If you’re running out of control plane resources but not data plane resources, you just set up another control plane,” Sardella said.

The JCS also includes more memory and drive space than typical routers. Each chassis contains 4 gigabytes of Flash, 4 GB of RAM and a 73-GB hard drive.

Juniper argues that the new product should give carriers more flexibility in offering new services while also allowing them to introduce new services more quickly, as the 1200 aids in testing new services before they go live.

"Decoupling the control plane shortens the time for service providers [to see] new revenues," said Ray Mota, an analyst with Synergy Research. "It reduces the risk of impacting existing revenues. And it allows service providers to carve out a piece of their network to establish prototypes, to target specific markets without affecting existing networks."

An external control plane could also alleviate some of the need for aggregation near the network edge, Mota said, which would help carriers save capital.