Juniper bringing 400GbE to PTX, QFX and MX Switches and Routers

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Juniper Networks

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Juniper Networks will bring 400GbE capabilities to its PTX, QFX and MX series switch and router line ups, aimed at data centres, WANs, enterprises and telecommunications companies. These capabilities will be launched later this year into 2019.

The renewed Juniper Networks switches and routers will support use cases such as hyperscale environments, network backbones, cloud services, and data centre interconnects. Juniper's push towards 400GbE, including the announcement last month of its 400GbE-capable Penta Silicon, is part of the 400GbE roadmap unveiled on July 24th.

Juniper Networks 400GbE PTX, QFX, MX Switches and Routers

Juniper Networks is pushing the Juniper product portfolio toward 400 Gigabit Ethernet, answering increasing bandwidth demand. The 400GbE capabilities are related to the migration to 5G networks and increasing adoption of modern technologies such as 4K video and augmented and virtual reality as well as cloud computing. In addition to the announcement, Juniper Networks said it also plans to develop new generations of ExpressPlus and Q5 silicon to support 400GbE including other features.

"Customers will realise the economic benefits of a 400GbE solution that breaks the historic cost-per-bit economics cycle that has been seen time and time again." - Manoj Leelanivas, executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Juniper

Manoj Leelanivas, executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Juniper, said that the developments around 400GbE will give businesses an easy migration path, improving both bandwidth and costs. Included are Juniper's upgrades to its products, but also its work to ensure the QSFD-DD spec for 400GbE kept the same interface densities as those with 100GbE.

Economic benefits of a 400GbE solution break historic cost-per-bit economics cycle

In a post on Juniper Networks' company blog, Leelanivas wrote that "customers will realise the economic benefits of a 400GbE solution that breaks the historic cost-per-bit economics cycle that has been seen time and time again". According to the Vice President and Chief Product Officer, delivering routing and switching platforms that offer investment protection when transitioning from 100GbE to 400GbE, "will also inspire our customers to pursue new applications—thanks to the significant amount of bandwidth now available to them".

The data centre and cloud networking industry is primed for the arrival of 400GbE shipments. Significant growth of initial shipments of 400GbE switches is expected this year. By 2022, most of the Ethernet network bandwidth in data centres will be 400GbE. This comes with the expectation that shipments of 100GbE systems will surpass those of 40GbE, three years after initial shipments hit the market, which illustrates the demand for fast and high-performance networks.

Scaling up, reducing application latency and handling spikes in network traffic

According to Juniper the capacity of data centres is being increased by organisations in order to address the growing amount of high-performance applications as the connectivity in their servers moves to 50GbE and 100GbE uplinks. Juniper Networks enhances its QFX series of switches with 400GbE capabilities, including the 3U (5.25-inch) QFX10003, which will offer 32x400GbE, making it possible to scale up to 160x100GbE. The improvements will be powered by next-generation Q5 silicon that offers a deep buffer enabled by Hybrid Memory Cube, which enables it to handle spikes in network traffic and reduce application latency. This will be available in the second half of this year.

Once available, the 1U (1.75-inch) QFX5220 runs on merchant silicon and offers 32x400GbE, as well as 50GbE, 100GbE and 400GbE interfaces for server and inter-fabric connectivity. The Juniper switch will be available in the first half of 2019.

Juniper also introduces 3U PTX10003 Packet Transfer Router

For WANs, Juniper has also introduced the 3U PTX10003 Packet Transfer Router for backbone, peering and data centre interconnect applications. This system is applicable for high-density 100GbE and 400GbE deployments, aimed at scale-out and cloud environments. The Juniper router, due in the second half of the year, includes native MACsec support for 160x100GbE and FlexE support for 32x400GbE interfaces.

As part of the 400GbE roadmap, Juniper officials also pointed to the MX Series 5G Universal Routing Platform, which was announced in June, powered by the new Penta Silicon and offering 400GbE interfaces.

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