JNPR: Juniper Networks Demonstrates Multivendor Ethernet Interoperability at Carrier Ethernet World Congress

Juniper Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: JNPR) today announced its participation in an interoperability event designed to serve as a blueprint for multivendor infrastructures offering residential IPTV, multiplay and business Ethernet services. The interoperability showcase is being held at the Carrier Ethernet World Congress in Madrid, Spain from September 25-29. Organized by the European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC), the demonstration features more than 50 Carrier Ethernet solutions from 16 vendors.

The eight day hot staging for the interoperability event was conducted in EANTC's lab in Berlin, Germany. All services in the test network were based on Carrier Ethernet as specified by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) with additional standards defined by IEEE 802 committee and the ITU. Juniper Networks M320 and M10i Multiservice Edge Routers, featuring the JUNOS operating system, demonstrated interoperability with other vendors’ equipment for the following technologies:

User-Network Interface (UNI) Type 1 services – E-Line (point-to-point) and E-LAN (multipoint) business applications. The event demonstrated a massive test bed of the MEF 10 architecture.

Ethernet scalability techniques include Link Aggregation and Q-in-Q VLAN stacking.

Strict Quality of Service (QoS) – specifically including MPLS Differentiated Services Traffic Engineering (DiffServ-TE).

Fault Management using MPLS Operations, Administration and Management (OAM) methods.

Ethernet Bandwidth Profile Definition.


"Participating in this multivendor interoperability event demonstrates Juniper Networks’ continuing commitment to the Carrier Ethernet market and to delivering best-in-class solutions for our service provider customers," Paul Gainham, director, EMEA Service Provider Marketing, Juniper Networks. "Our Ethernet-based solutions deliver the performance, quality and reliability required by our service provider customers as they deploy and continue to scale converged Ethernet and IP-based networks to support IPTV and multiplay service offerings."

JUNOS E-LAN services are built on Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)-based Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS), and therefore, Juniper Networks platforms are designed to scale multipoint Ethernet services beyond metropolitan area networks. Some examples of these enhanced features include:

Inter-Carrier E-LAN services: An important feature for VPLS providers of all sizes, Inter-Carrier VPLS capabilities allow large providers who have multiple autonomous systems (AS) to easily set up VPLS domains across them. Important for smaller carriers, Inter-Carrier VPLS allows them to partner with other providers to provide global VPNs or to use other carriers for transport of VPLS.

Multi-homed Ethernet services: Multi-homing enables service providers to provide their customers with added reliability by allowing one E-Line or E-LAN customer site to be connected to the carrier network by way of two independent connection points. One access point is the primary connection, and the other is a standby or back-up connection activated in the event of a failure of the operating connection. This is achieved using BGP and does not require the carrier to run technologies like Spanning Tree.

Improved Control Plane Scaling: BGP-VPLS can leverage BGP Route Reflectors to improve control plane scaling of E-LAN services without interfering in the data path of the service.