Juniper Touts "Revolutionary" Net Processor Breakthrough

Juniper gave a few tantalizing details of advanced technology in its development pipeline at an analysts day Tuesday.

The company's founder and chief technology officer, Pradeep Sindhu, announced a new silicon initiative from Juniper that he claimed was a quantum jump over current solutions. Sindhu called it a network instruction set processor and it is being designed to enable highly optimized networking data flows.

The new processor set includes 4 chips built in 65 nanometer technology encompassing 1.2 billion transistors. Sindu claimed that the new silicon would provide up to 604 Gbps of input/output (I/O)

"It is going to revolutionize networking engines built in silicon; we're confident of that." Sindhu said.

Juniper's rival Cisco Systems in 2008 rolled out its own new silicon Quantum Flow microprocessor which contains up to 40 cores and can run 48 billion instructions per second.

Juniper also took its analyst day as an opportunity to pre-announce its Stratus cloud computing fabric. The new fabric is supposed to be able to provide increased scalability for converged physical and virtual data center environments.

"Stratus will augment Juniper's portfolio and will offer more flexibility and choices to our customers," said Juniper executive vice president David Yen.

But Yen was unable to provide much detail on what Stratus will actually entail or when it will be available.

"We are not prepared today for competitive reasons to disclose details on the project regarding specific milestones, product configuration, pricing or availability," Yen said.

Yen noted that the reason why Juniper was disclosing that Stratus is under development is to demonstrate to customers and the market that Juniper is a long term strategic vendor.

Juniper's Switch Pays Off

Juniper also announced a new addition to its EX switch portfolio with the EX25000 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch. Juniper entered the switch market in 2008 after not participating in the market for the previous 12 years of its existence.

The move into switches is something that company CEO Kevin Johnson said is paying off for Juniper. He noted that the introduction of the EX has enabled Juniper to sell more broadly.

Johnson said that over 50 percent of the customers ordering Juniper switches were also buying other Juniper equipment with it. Additionally Johnson said that between 30 and 40 percent of customers buying EX switching gear were new customers for Juniper.

"The portfolio and the depth of solutions that we have is coming to life," Johnson said. "It's transitioning from more of a product focus to a solution focus."

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