ENGINEERING

Juniper Networks has announced that the Shanghai Branch of China Telecom Corporation has deployed its top-of-the-line multi-chassis routing system in a production environment. Implementation of the Juniper Networks TX Matrix Plus, interconnecting Juniper Networks T1600 Core Routers, provides China Telecom with an extremely stable and flexible platform to continue scaling the core of its super metro area network in Shanghai and to support Expo 2010, which is taking place in the city.

China Telecom has 3.5 million Shanghai broadband customers, including 1.2 million IPTV subscribers, and had been using Juniper Networks TX Matrix with three T640 Core Routers within its network there since 2006. With a continually increasing customer base and rising bandwidth demand in China's largest and most commercially important city, which has a population of more than 20 million, the company needed a core routing platform that would make it easier to continue scaling its metro area network services.

"The TX Matrix Plus system and T1600 Core Routers were designed to address some of the latest network engineering challenges faced by telecommunications service providers, and scaling broadband service in Shanghai is an example of such a challenge," said Luc Ceuppens, vice president of product marketing, Juniper Infrastructure Products Group. "Our core network solution scales in multiple dimensions -- on the forwarding, control, and service planes -- providing a reliable, high-performance, and flexible architecture that can carry a wide breadth of services over a common IP/MPLS infrastructure. That means China Telecom can continue to scale its Shanghai network and conform to stringent service-level agreements while minimizing both capital and operational expenditures."

The Juniper Networks TX Matrix Plus system underwent certification testing at China Telecom's Academy of Science & Technology in Guangzhou during the middle of 2009. And in October Juniper successfully staged a stringent proof-of-concept in Shanghai, leading to the decision to deploy the TX Matrix Plus by the end of the Q1 2010.

The systems are currently connected to network links -- including OC768, OC192, OC48, 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet ports. China Telecom can scale its Shanghai core network as needed with addition of more line cards -- including Juniper Networks' new 100 Gigabit Ethernet interface.

The TX Matrix Plus leverages the superior technology of Juniper's T1600, the industry's highest capacity, most energy-efficient single-chassis core router. The T1600 and TX Matrix Plus lower total cost of ownership by delivering up to 25 percent more routing capacity in half the footprint, and with up to 40 percent less power than competing solutions available today. The TX Matrix Plus architecture supports up to 25 Tbps of throughput and 30 billion packets a second of forwarding capacity by integrating up to sixteen T1600s into a single multi-chassis routing node.