James E. Carroll
Editor-in-Chief
Juniper Networks 
unveiled its next generation T4000 core router featuring 16-slots operating at 240 Gbps and capable of supporting high-densities of 10G connections, as well as 40 and 100GE interfaces. The new platform, which continues Juniper's Junos operating system and retains existing interfaces from its T640 and T1600 core routers, addresses the scalability challenges of service provider backbone and major Internet peering points. The T4000 packs four terabits of line rate throughput in a half rack chassis. It is driven by the company's second generation ASICs, which are implemented using 45nm technology and capable of delivering 250 million packet-per-second forwarding performance per slot -- this is double the forwarding capacity of Cisco's latest CRS-3 router, according to the company.
Juniper's Trio silicon was first unveiled in October 2009 for use in its MX series edge routers. The first generation was implemented in 60nm technology and optimized for highly granular packet processing. The second generation features the smaller and more energy-efficient 45nm technology and is optimized for the high-throughput requirements of core routing. By comparison, the T1600 uses 90nm silicon.
Key design criteria for the T4000 are investment protection and evolution of existing routing, said Luc Ceuppens, vice president of product marketing, Juniper Networks. Existing T640 and T1600 routers are in-service upgradeable to T4000 status by swapping out their power entry modules, switch interface boards, fans and adding a new face panel. The upgrade process can be completed in about 90 minutes without bringing down the system -- "like changing a car's engine while the car continues in motion." The system is also designed with High Availability hardware and component level redundancy for routing engines, CBs and SIBs.
A fully loaded T4000 system can support up to 192 ports of 10GbE, or 16 ports of 100GbE interfaces.
Like the previous generations of the T-series, the T4000 has multichassis capability designed into the architecture. The multi-chassis support, which will come after the initial release, will tie together up to four T4000s using the company's TX Matrix Plus.
Juniper said its T4000 also breaks new ground in power efficiency in terms of watt per bit processed -- 2.7 watts of power per Gigabit of processed traffic -- which is more than three times as efficient as the T1600.
The T4000 is being shown at the Supercomputing 2010 show in New Orleans. Commercial availability is expected in the second half of 2011.
Currently, there are about 6,000 Juniper T-series routers in deployment around the world.
http://www.juniper.net
- Juniper Networks first unveiled its T1600 core router in June 2007.
