Juniper’s M120 Delivers M320 Features in a Smaller, Less Expensive Format

Juniper Networks Inc. today officially takes the wraps off a new multiservice edge router called the M120 – the “baby brother” to the company’s M320, as Alan Sardella, product marketing manager, put it.

The M120, which is about half the size of the M320, can be used in more business-focused, multiservice edge applications that feed into an MPLS. It also can aggregate traffic into a Juniper E series router in telco and cableco residential triple-play applications.

This new, mid-range solution offers many of the same features as the M320 – including 10gig uplinks, the ability to support flexible QoS options, support for existing Layer 2 interfaces such as ATM and frame relay as well as Ethernet services and the slots to accept the company’s new PIC cards, but the M120 is the first Juniper box based on the company’s new I-chip next-generation Internet processor.

Juniper’s existing products, including the M320, are based on a complex of about 10 ASICs, but I-chip is a single, bigger ASIC, said Sardella, which offers a higher level of redundancy at a lower cost. The higher redundancy is achieved because the I-chip moves packet processing functionality onto a separate board, called the forwarding engine board, that plugs into the back of the M120’s chassis. So if a particular forwarding engine board goes out, it doesn’t take all of the packet processing with it, he explained.

Sardella said the M120 also offers new improvements in the areas of QoS, policing functionality, the ability to do marking in multiple parts of a packet, and new headroom to support growth of Internet routing tables.

“We can scale and not breathe hard at very high numbers of packet filters or QoS markings and hierarchical QoS, traffic policing and monitoring, and multicast,” Sardella said. “That’s because of our hardware-based packet forwarding engine.” The M120 stays at or close to line rate despite the number of services service providers want to turn up, he said. That’s especially important in the case of a distributed denial-of-service attack for which a service provider needs to quickly add filters to all of the box’s interfaces without degrading the overall performance of the box. He said that can also come in handy when the box needs to be used for lawful intercept purposes or when mobile operators need to increase their number of VPNs for Wi-Fi or WiMAX applications.

The M120 has two 10gig specialized uplink interfaces, so there’s more room for subscriber-facing ports, continued Sardella, adding that the box also includes oversubscription capabilities, the ability to deliver committed information rate services and more.

Sardella continued that similarly priced solutions from Alcatel and Cisco Systems Inc.

offer far fewer logical interfaces than the M120 for about the same price. (He declined to provide pricing for the M120). While the M120 supports 100,000 logical interfaces, the Alcatel 7750 supports about 60,000 while the Cisco 7609 delivers just 4,000, according to Sardella.

The M120, now in betas with undisclosed customers, is slated for release in October. It includes two compact flexible PIC concentrators (cFPCs) for WAN interfaces for 10gigE or OC192 connections. The four full-sized FPCs come in three versions. Type 1, with 4 PICs/FPC, supports T1 to OC12 connections; Type 2, with 4 PICs/FPC, allows for four OC12s, up to single OC48, or multiple gigE ports; and Type 3, or 1 PICs/FPC, enables an OC192, four OC48s or a 10gigE connection. A chassis containing all the PICs could go up to 128gigE ports.

Juniper Networks Inc. www.juniper.net

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