Juniper Networks Inc. on Monday announced the newest member of the T-series family, the T1600 core router, which doubles the capacity of its predecessor and brings service-awareness to the core. The T1600 will be available in fourth quarter and will be in beta trials in third quarter.

     The T1600 supports 1.6tbps of capacity in a single chassis. It can scale to deliver up to 3.2tbps of throughput in a single standard seven-foot rack, more than twice the density of the competing platform, namely Cisco Systems Inc.’ CRS-1. It also supports 100GB per slot, which means the ability to handle Nx10Gb interfaces or 40GB SONET interfaces in a single slot.

     “When we talk to customers, almost universally they are saying that they have an 80-plus percent increase in their traffic year on year,” said Chris Komatas, Juniper Network’s manager of service provider marketing for next-generation networks, noting the requirements to support high-quality multimedia services. “But it’s not just about scale. These new services have a demand of being delivered with an assured user experience and this makes the impact on the network quite different than the growth that we have seen in the past, which was just about being addressed with pure scale on the core routers. Now, we need to have control of that traffic end to end, so we can make guarantees on that user experience.”

     The T1600 is policy-enabled and managed through the session resource control (SRC) capability Juniper announced in mid-March. The SRC module gathers and compiles data from multiple sources – the network, subscribers and applications – and uses this information to automatically control and manage network resources in real time. “Instead of just taking the service awareness of IMS (IP multimedia subsystem) and pushing the policy to the edge, we are using that knowledge and using it to control the core of the network,” said Komatas.