Epsilon deploys Juniper's Metro Fabric for 100GbE global expansion

Epsilon, a privately-held global communications service provider based in London and Singapore, has deployed Juniper’s Metro Fabric solutions to support its global network upgrades to power future IoT applications and robust enterprise services.

Epsilon combines on-demand infrastructure, automation, web-based portals and APIs to deliver "friction-free access to global connectivity for resolving complex networking challenges." Its "Infiny by Epsilon" connectivity is based on a self-service SDN platform.  The current network is a terabit optical global backbone, which is deployed across over 90 Points of Presence (PoP) globally and connects over 600 network operators, communication and cloud service providers.

For this upgrade project, Epsilon required seamless integration with their existing network for optimized network management and the ability to quickly scale for service expansion and speed of delivery. These requirements will also enable end-to-end service level agreement (SLA) visibility, a key differentiator that will support web-based on-demand provisioning.

Juniper said its solution was chosen after an extensive evaluation process. Some highlights:

• 100GbE-readiness with flexibility in the underlay: uses a combination of the MX10003 5G Universal Routing Platform as the MPLS transport core, and Metro Fabric solutions from Juniper consisting of the ACX5048 Universal Metro Router and BTI Packet Optical Transport Platforms. This enables a variety of connectivity options across 1GbE/10GbE/100GbE, tailored to individual market requirements.
• Interoperability, automation and a single-pane-of-management: Across the stack, network management is now significantly streamlined, while offering end-to-end visibility and increased automation capabilities. Leverages interoperability of Juniper’s solutions and the open APIs provided by the Junos operating system.
• Forward-looking scalability to support IoT and big data applications: leverages continued upgrades of the MX Series 5G Universal Routing Platform and ACX Series Universal Metro Routers, offering the current and long-term scalability and investment protection required to service more than 100 points-of-presence across the United States, Europe, Middle East and Asia-Pacific.

“We have been evolving our infrastructure gradually over the last decade in anticipation for the massive traffic growth driven by innovations in cloud, big data and IoT. By upgrading our network to offer 100GbE on-demand around the world, we are helping not only our existing partners but also new customers to benefit from hyper-scalable connectivity that is designed to support services of the future. We are pleased to partner with Juniper to realize our vision for flexible, fluid and intelligent global networking,” stated Jerzy Szlosarek, chief executive officer, Epsilon.

“The exponentially growing demands of today’s and tomorrow’s networking traffic is a continuously-evolving challenge for our customers. As we continue to address these and other networking complexities, we are proud to have found an outstanding long-term partner in Epsilon. Their rapidly growing global platforms demand a stellar foundation of powerful and reliable network infrastructure solutions that are adaptable to future requirements – and we are delighted to continue providing them with the critical technology differentiators crucial for their continued growth and success in the long-term,” said Sally Bament, vice president, service provider marketing, Juniper Networks.

Juniper refreshes MX edge routers powered by its Penta silicon

Tuesday, June 12, 2018  Juniper  

Juniper Networks introduced its new MX Series 5G Universal Routing Platform powered by a new generation of its custom ASICs promising extensive programmability and performance improvements for supporting resource-intensive applications like 5G and secure SD-WAN-based managed services.

The new "Penta" silicon, which leverages 16nm geometry, functions as the packet forwarding engine for the MX series. It delivers a 50 percent power efficiency gain (0.5 watts per gigabit) over the existing Junos Trio chipset, which leads to a 3x bandwidth increase for the MX960, MX480 and MX240. Juniper designed the Penta silicon with native support of both MACsec and an IPsec crypto engine – an industry-first – that can originate and terminate thousands of IPSec sessions without sacrificing performance. Additionally, Juniper Penta supports flexible native Ethernet support (FlexE).

Juniper Penta silicon features:

• 16nm with Integrated 3D HBM Memory reducing packaging by 83% over the 4th Generation Trio silicon 
• 500G Full Duplex / 1T Half Duplex 
• 50Gbps SERDES 
• Fully Programmable Packet Pipeline 
• Fully Fungible Integrated Databases for FIB, ACLs, Tunnels, Telemetry, and more… 
• Built-in FlexEthernet Support 
• Built-in MACSec & IPSec Tunnel Encryption Engine (Industry First)

A second major innovation with the platform is open hardware-accelerated 5G Control and User Plane Separation (CUPS), which enables operators to separate the evolved packet core user plane (GTP-U) and control plane (GTP-C) with a standardized Sx interface. This allows service providers to scale the control plane and the user plane independently as needed for added flexibility and investment protection.

Juniper said its MX Series 5G platform is the first networking platform to support a standard-based hardware accelerated 5G user-plane in both existing and future MX routers to enable converged services (wireless and wireline) on the same platform while also allowing integration with third-party 5G control planes. Juniper expects this will lower total cost of ownership by as much as three to four times over software-based user plane implementations for MXs deployed in the field.

In addition, the rollout expands Juniper Universal Chassis system. The previously announced PTX and QFX Universal Chassis gains two new MX variants: MX10008 and MX10016. The 13-RU MX10008 and 21-RU MX10016 Universal Chassis bring industry-leading and space-saving scale for edge routers at 19.2Tbps and 38.4Tbps, respectively.

The MX10008 and MX100016 will be available during the second half of 2018. Juniper Penta Silicon-powered line cards for the MX960, MX480 and MX240 will be available in Q1 2019. New CUPS support will be available in the first half of 2019.