Pimp My Ride: Edge Routers Offer More Bling

Edge routers are expanding their functionality — supporting a wider variety of both newer and legacy protocols and services, and bundling in new security features.

This pumped-up functionality is largely in response to the fact that service providers are facing margin pressures due to declining wireline and wireless ARPU while at the same time being pushed to invest in more infrastructure to support rich media, among other traffic.

So vendors including Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO), Juniper Networks (JNPR) and Redback Networks are offering souped-up routers that offer more functionality, meaning service providers have to invest less in the gear upfront, as well as realize savings in housing, cooling and managing fewer boxes.

For its part, Juniper recently unveiled a variety of new hardware and software functionality for its M- and MX-series routers. Juniper said these enhancements fall under its Intelligent Services Edge effort, which leverages a single, consistent operating system — JUNOS — and high-performance hardware to deliver a variety of services, including broadband routing, voice, multimedia and integrated security, as well as application-level awareness.

The Intelligent Services Edge extends the power of JUNOS, according to Juniper, by adding broadband services routing, which extends subscriber management technology from the E-series Broadband Services Routers to the M- and MX-series platforms; dynamic application awareness, which leverages Juniper’s security and policy management to provide stateful, subscriber-aware application monitoring, enabling advanced, application-specific service levels and QoS treatments; intrusion prevention, which provides application-layer security leveraging Juniper’s intrusion detection and prevention (IDP) technology; and session border control (SBC) functionality, which manages VoIP and multimedia sessions to ensure QoS and security for VoIP and multimedia applications.

For the MX-series Ethernet Services Routers, Juniper is introducing the MultiServices DPC, a high-performance, purpose-built processing engine that will enable customers to run the new JUNOS services without impacting the routers’ forwarding performance. With the MultiServices DPC, customers also will be able to deploy security features such as stateful firewall, NAT and IPSec directly on the MX-series router, in addition to routing and switching. The MultiServices DPC also can host applications developed by customers and partners through Juniper’s Open IP Solution Development Program (OSDP).

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