Grintek appointed channel partner for Juniper Networks

Issued by Saab Grintek

Johannesburg, 27 Jul 2000

Grintek Telecom and US-based Juniper Networks have entered into an agreement, which will see Grintek as sole distributor for Juniper's Internet backbone router products as well as integrate Juniper technology into the solutions it develops for customers.

Juniper is a world leader in Internet backbone routers with more than 20% of the world market share. Its technology portfolio is unique in that it has been developed to optimise IP infrastructure to provide higher reliability and faster forwarding rates. Applications for Juniper Network routers include backbone bandwidth management, multi-services, content and Web hosting, public and private peering, and high-speed access.

Says Delio Senatore, general manager, telecommunication networks at Grintek Telecom, "Grintek is breaking new ground for the South African service provider market with this new partnership. Juniper is a touchstone company which invests heavily in the research and development of new technologies designed to handle the ever increasing loads placed on IP networks today. Its milestones have become performance benchmarks that are still unequalled. For example, the introduction of its M40 Internet backbone router in 1998 saw a wire rate optical router capable of achieving a throughput of 40 million packets per second (pps). It was also the world's first fully concatenated 2GB router. At the time of its release, the M20 router offered the highest port density per rack inch while the M160 router was the first, and only, to achieve OC192c/STM 64 performance and an aggregate throughput of 160Gbps."

"In South Africa, IP networking is growing at a phenomenal rate. Combined with increased use of Voice-over-IP, multimedia streaming and e-commerce, we are heading for an explosion in Internet use that is threatened by scarce bandwidth availability.

"This explosion in the IP traffic will drive the development of optical networks thereby increasing the available bandwidth. Service providers that want to be at the forefront of these developments need to be prepared and build out a solid and scalable IP infrastructure now. At the same time, many service providers are faced with the same vulnerabilities experienced by their international counterparts. These include such things as the need to handle more complex packet movements and susceptibility to Denial Of Service (DoS) attacks, the same phenomena that brought down AOL and other major Internet providers.

"Juniper has developed technology, such as its Internet Processor II ASIC, released in April this year, to handle these problems from happening. The Internet Processor II integrates flow-based feature sets for filtering which enable it to maintain a high throughput, a contrast to conventional CPU-based routers which slow down network performance considerably."

Says Tony Wright, systems engineer at Juniper Networks, "When Juniper set about looking for a channel partner in South Africa, and our primary goal was to find a company best suited to integrate our technology into solutions rather than to act simply as a reseller. Grintek and Juniper share synergies that will see our products released onto the Southern African market with added value and supported by a partner with a solution engineering background. With Grintek we have a win-win situation."

Says Wright, "Juniper has experienced extreme growth due largely to the kind of leading edge technology it offers the market. The company was established in 1996 by Dr Pradeep Sindhu who spent a number of years at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC developing design tools for VLSI and high-speed interconnects for shared memory multiprocessors. Applying ASICs to Internet devices was something that was fundamentally different to the way in which many companies were working. With its purpose-built hardware and software, the company has managed to capture a significant share of the market including 9 out of 10 of the leading Tier 1 providers. Some of its major customers include UUNet, Cable & Wireless and KPNQwest, which purchased a large number of M160 routers for its huge optical fibre rollout in Europe. By 2003, it is estimated that the router market will be worth $12 billion to $15 billion with only two major players of which Juniper is already one."

"Juniper has always maintained four fundamentals necessary for its products to succeed - compatibility to existing internetworking technology at the physical and product layer; software reliability and stability which is core to the Internet; maintain a high density of ports per rack inch; and to guarantee wire rate performance in all packets even in high stress environments. This dedication to performance without compromise as well as ensuring that development is customer driven have made Juniper a leader in its field."

"The future of internetworking is with optical and IP technologies," adds Wright. "These are two area which will see the fastest growth. With some area of the optical market almost vendor-specific, Juniper is looking at improving the interoperability of the technology. We will also see a move towards the next generation networks, which will be 2-layered DWDM and core IP. We are looking at ways in which to make the two layers communicate faster and better."