Juniper Networks take on Cisco

["Constantine Protopapas" <wiztech at cmpnetmail.com>]

This is the reactions from 2 serious magazines in the field of networking
about yesterday's announcement of JUNOS by Juniper Networks.

Juniper breaks silence with router OS rollout
JUNOS designed for scale, reliability; software key to unseating Cisco in
'Net core.
By Jim Duffy
Network World Fusion, 7/1/98

Mountain View, Calif. - Heavily funded router start-up Juniper Networks,
Inc. broke its silence today by unveiling the operating system behind its
forthcoming Internet backbone router.

Juniper, which has been the most closely watched of the high-speed router
start-ups because of its funding and funders - $62 million from the likes of
Lucent Technologies, Inc., Northern Telecom, Ltd. And 3Com Corp. - has also
been the most tight-lipped about its product development. That may be
because the company does not want to tip its hand on something that might
actually give Cisco Systems, Inc. a run for the Internet backbone money.

Still, Juniper did tip its hand ever so slightly with the introduction of
its JUNOS operating system. Rather than a delivery vehicle for
differentiated classes of Internet services, the JUNOS software is designed
to help scale the Internet via traffic engineering and ensure predictable
service through software reliability, said Joe Furgerson, Juniper director
of marketing.

For end users, this translates into increased uptime and consistent service,
Furgerson said. Juniper users concur.

"It dramatically increases our confidence that we will have access to the
technology to keep scaling along with what the demands on the network are,"
said Michael O'Dell, vice president and chief scientist at UUNET
Technologies, Inc. "We can keep running. That's the important part of this."

More than superfast routing and switching hardware, which most start-ups
have been highlighting, software will be the key enabler of Internet
performance and reliability, Juniper asserts. And software will be the way
the gain entry into Cisco's lockhold on the Internet core, Furgerson said.

"In entering this market, you've got to answer the question about why one
vendor has 85% to 90% of the market. We think it is the special complexity
and special implications of software in the Internet core," Furgerson said.
"Unless you essentially get on the back of the bull you never catch up.
You've got to get your software base qualified first."

"[The software] is where the scaling challenges are in a number of
dimensions," said UUNET's O'Dell. "There are some profound limits to the Old
Same Thing," he said, in an apparent reference to Cisco's installed base
issues.

Juniper said JUNOS will be a strong entry into Cisco's base. For traffic
engineering, the software features the Internet Engineering Task Force's
Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) specification for mapping IP packets
and flows onto frame relay or ATM virtual circuits. MPLS helps ISPs manage
growth and provides a foundation on which other value-added services - such
as differentiated classes of service and virtual private networks - can be
offered over the Internet backbone, Juniper said.

For reliability, JUNOS is based on a modular software architecture with
separate programs running in protected memory space on top of a Unix kernel.
This approach improves reliability by ensuring that modifications made to
one software module have no unwanted side effects on other sections of the
software, the company said.

Monolithic, nonmodular operating systems that do not run in protected memory
are prone to system-wide failure, Juniper said.

For added reliability, JUNOS brings a number of fe f3e atures that includes
configuration and monitoring tools to avoid user error that leads to network
downtime. JUNOS allows users to test complex changes before applying them to
a live environment. The software allows operators to apply configuration
changes in logical blocks, and if the new configuration contains an error,
the software automatically reverts back to the initial configuration.

JUNOS also offers a variety of routing protocols, such as Border Gateway
Protocol 4, Open Shortest Path First, Intermediate System-to-Intermediate
System, and Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol and Protocol
Independent Multicast for controlling multicast traffic. JUNOS also has been
rigorously tested by four ISPs and a telecom equipment provider, including
@Home Networks, LM Ericsson, MCI, UUNET and Verio, Inc.

JUNOS will debut later this year with Juniper's Internet backbone router. As
usual, Juniper was mum on router details.


Wired News wrote:

0:15am  1.Jul.98.PDT
If the Internet is a clogged highway, Juniper Networks says the fix is not
necessarily a wider road.
The key is traffic control, says the 2-year-old start-up, which is
announcing a new operating system today for Internet routers, the boxes that
hand off data between a network's many intersections. Backed by a bevy of
high-profile investors, including Nortel, UUNet, 3Com, and AT&T,
expectations are high for the newest networking kid on the block.

The company said its software, JUNOS, is the first router operating system
to implement such "traffic control," letting administrators of the
Internet's largest backbones choose routes across their networks for more
efficient and dependable data delivery.

Once deployed, Juniper said JUNOS' effect on Internet backbones will be
significant.

"The Net will become a much more reliable service because [Internet backbone
operators] will have tools to manage growth better," said Joe Ferguson,
Juniper's director of product marketing. "You'll get a much more reliable
Internet service and a much more functional Internet service."

As the backbone networks keep growing at a tremendous rate, Ferguson said,
operators will need the technology that's in JUNOS to better control the
movement of data across the networks.

Competitor and established router giant Cisco Systems said that Juniper's
technology would not, in fact, be the first implementation of MPLS traffic
control. "That one's curious," Cisco Director of Product Marketing Rob
Redford said of Juniper's claim. "Perhaps they're not fully informed as to
what we're actually shipping." An MPLS implementation has been part of
Cisco's standard router operating system, called Cisco IOS, since May, he
said.

"It's a new approach that we're seeing a lot of industry convergence on,"
Redford said. "We think it's great that Juniper is getting on the bandwagon,
and we welcome their participation in this."

JUNOS will serve as a foundation for all future Juniper backbone products,
including its upcoming router hardware, expected by year's end.

Because of the prominent investors -- who have poured around US$55 million
into the company -- and JUNOS' long gestation period, some hung the
vaporware label on Juniper's technology. So delivering a working router by
year's end will be important for the company to live up to its hype -- and
take on Cisco.

JUNOS implements a developing standard which is specifically meant for
traffic engineering and control. Backers consider the standard, called
Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), fundamental to better reliability of
traffic flow on the Net. It is being drafted at the Internet Engineering
Task Force.

MPLS, said Ferguson, is a window that gives network administrators a new and
important tool. "It gives them visibility into the traffic pattern for their
network. It allows them to map routes on the traffic trunks as they wish. It
gives them a great deal of flexibility."

As administrators come to better understand the sources and destinations of
their traffic, they will essentially be able to "code" their networks for
better traffic flow, Ferguson said.

Network providers testing JUNOS since January include @Home, Verio, MCI and
UUNET, the backbone service now owned by WorldCom. Juniper said the
experience of these companies contributed to JUNOS' design, specifically
their requirements for controlling the exponential growth of their Internet
backbones.


Some comments on these 2 articles:
1) Obviously there are some companies that want to end Cisco's monopoly on
the routing segment of the Internet. This is understandable, as Cisco tends
to use proprietary protocols in their routers ( eg. IGRP, Tag Switching) to
effectively monopolize the market.

2) As Cisco states on the Wired article its IOS software implements a
version of MPLS; they probably refer to Tag Switching, which is NOT a
standard. So, this statement looks to me as them being condescending towards
Juniper.

Constantine Protopapas
Wiztech Internet Consulting
tel: ++30-1-6801391
e-mail:	wiztech at cmpnetmail.com
		wiztech at hol.gr