Juniper follows Cisco with edge upgrade

New switch fabric scales MX 3D line to 3.8Tbps

Juniper this week enhanced its service provider edge routers to address growing bandwidth requirements of emerging mobile, cloud computing and enterprise network applications.

Juniper increased the capacity of its MX 3D edge routers to 3.8Tbps. The capacity improvements apply to all MX series services, Juniper says, including the company's new MobileNext mobile core platform for wireless networks.

The previous switch capacity on the MX series was 2.6Tbps.

A DAY EARLIER: Cisco unveils routers, takes swipe at Juniper

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Juniper this week enhanced its service provider edge routers to address growing bandwidth requirements of emerging mobile, cloud computing and enterprise network applications.

Juniper increased the capacity of its MX 3D edge routers to 3.8Tbps. The capacity improvements apply to all MX series services, Juniper says, including the company's new MobileNext mobile core platform for wireless networks.

The previous switch capacity on the MX series was 2.6Tbps.

A DAY EARLIER: Cisco unveils routers, takes swipe at Juniper

The upgrade can be achieved through an in-service switch fabric exchange to existing MX series chassis, Juniper says. The company also claims the MX can now support up to three times as many subscribers and double the platform and rack capacity of competitive platforms at less than one-third the total power consumption.

The MX requires less than 4 watts per gigabit of processed traffic, Juniper says.

A single MX960 can support 8 million mobile subscribers or 10,000 business VPNs. It can also process more than 8 billion views on YouTube a day, more than two times the average daily views of the website globally, Juniper says.

The new switch fabric for the MX Series is shipping now. It will go up against Cisco's ASR 9000 series, which Cisco says can scale to 6.4Tbps; and Alcatel-Lucent's 7750, which scales to 2Tbps "and beyond," according to Alcatel-Lucent.

Juniper's announcement comes a day after Cisco announced its own expansion of the ASR 9000 edge router line, and unveiled an aggressive marketing campaign against Juniper.

Juniper did not disclose pricing for the new switch fabric.

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