Peer 1 Network Enterprises Inc. of Vancouver plans to spend more than $1 million upgrading the routers in its Canadian data centres starting next month.
Peer 1, which offers managed hosting, dedicated hosting and co-location services, will install Juniper MX960 Ethernet Services Routers at its facilities in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal starting next month, said Jag Bains, the company’s director of network operations.
The company has been using M120 routers, also made by Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Juniper Networks Inc., since January, 2008. Peer 1 operates a total of 16 data centres, including 11 in the U.S., plus facilities in London and Amsterdam. In addition to hosting and co-location, it also operates SuperNetwork, which is comprised of dedicated links among its locations, plus PIX Exchange, a peering exchange service that uses Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet links. It has a total of 21 points of presence.
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Bains said Peer 1 had evaluated routers from Cisco Systems, Force 10 Networks and Foundry, which was acquired by Brocade last December. It selected the MX960 partly because of the distributed architecture, Bains said.
“The ability to have line cards act independently in a distributed architecture is really really important,” Bains said, adding if one customer has a security problem or a bandwidth spike, he wants to ensure it does not affect another customer relying on the same router.
Other selection factors included the cost and the fact that the Juniper routers support Internet Protocol version 6, Bains said. Although a general rollout of IPv6 is “at least six to eight months away,” IPv6 has good streaming and multicasting features, he added.
The MX960 provides 960 Gigabits per second routing at Layers 2 and 3. It has dense port concentrators designed to support up to 40 Gigabit Ethernet or four 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports.
“The MX960 is dedicated to Ethernet, so it’s less expensive” said Colin Wymes, director of sales for Juniper Networks. “As the marketplace migrates more to the Ethernet world, machines like the MX960 become highly appealing to service providers in general.”
Wymes added The MX960 router’s target markets include data centre hosting firms, Internet service providers and telecom carriers.
Juniper says the MX960 can provide virtual private LAN and virtual lease line services. Other features include multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) and the JunOS operating system.
Last year the company announced it would combine features from its other operating systems, including subscriber management, intrusion detection and prevention and session border control, into JunOS.