Juniper Networks has introduced the QFX10000 line of spine switches and the new Junos Fusion® for data centers to provide network scale and automation capabilities. The new offerings are designed to help public and private cloud customers, as well as traditional IT data centers deploy small to Internet-scale networks. The QFX10000 are the first data center switches powered by Juniper’s new Q5 chip, a purpose-built ASIC that enables unprecedented performance, port density and scale to grow cloud networks as business demands.

As organizations place more of their business assets, intellectual property and applications in public and private data centers and clouds, the network needs to scale rapidly and seamlessly to keep up with business growth. This is why data center networks are quickly outstripping the scale of 10G and 40G interfaces and moving to 100G networks. According to Dell’Oro¹, spending on 100GE capable networking equipment is expected to grow from just over $100M in 2014 to nearly $8 billion in 2019.

To address this challenge, the QFX10000 line of switches offers customers industry-leading 10, 40 and 100GE port density, as well as superior performance and total system scale. Together with the openness and automation capabilities in the Junos operating system, the new switches will ensure Juniper’s customers can seamlessly scale their clouds and data centers while extracting maximum value from their network infrastructure well into the future.

QFX10000 Line Highlights

The QFX10000 line and Junos Fusion for data centers are the latest addition to Juniper Networks® MetaFabric™ architecture and can be deployed in traditional multi-tier networks, IP and Ethernet fabrics as well as fully virtualized networks to give customers complete deployment flexibility. The QFX10000 collapses spine, core and data center edge capabilities into a single platform, significantly reducing network complexity and CapEx.

This new line extends Juniper’s successful QFX Series portfolio to now include large scale, high performance spine switches, in addition to the QFX5100 line, which is ideally suited for leaf or smaller spine deployments. Together, Juniper Networks delivers a comprehensive portfolio that serves all types of data center networking needs—from enterprise data centers to the largest private or public clouds.

The QFX10000 line will include three platforms, all of which leverage the innovative new Q5 chipset.

Industry Leading Scale and Density for Long-Term Investment Protection:

The QFX10002 is the industry’s most compact 100GE spine switch, delivered in a fixed configuration 2-rack unit form-factor with the ability for customers to upgrade seamlessly from 40GE to 100GE within the same switch. Additionally, it offers 2 to 4 times the system and 5 to 10 times the logical scale of competitors’ larger and power hungry switches, resulting in simple, efficient network designs and reduced OpEx.

The QFX10008 is a modular, eight slot chassis that delivers ground breaking 100GE port density and up to 48Tbps of total system capacity.

The QFX10016 will deliver unprecedented system capacity of up to 96Tbps, combined with leading port density in a powerful 16-slot chassis.

Purpose-built Q5 Chip Delivers Unparalleled Performance for Cloud Switches:

The Q5 ASIC sits at the heart of the new QFX10000 switch line and offers deep telemetry capabilities that boost the analytics and automation of the QFX10000 line.

With deep buffers and an architecture that supports diverse, demanding applications, the Q5 ASIC offers reliable performance, scalable virtualization for SDN, and logical scale for applications such as big data, video and IP storage.

The Q5 ASIC employs hybrid memory cube technology, a highly advanced capability not found in merchant silicon.

Open and Automation-Enabled Software Architecture:

Junos Fusion for data centers is a flexible, open architecture that shares common switching building blocks with QFabric System. It enables coherency through automation and manages the entire data center as a single network rather than individual network elements.

Junos Fusion makes it easy to automate the turn-up and configuration of new networks and reduces the risk of configuration errors. In conjunction with EVPN/VxLAN, it simplifies application placement across multiple layers of the network.

The QFX product line features enhancements to the Junos DevOps feature suite that allow customers to write custom applications in any programming language to interact with Junos.

The new switch line is designed to make network management and provisioning simple and automated, with support for a highly diverse set of automation and orchestration tools, including Junos Space Network Director as well as industry tools such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and OpenStack.

Integration with Juniper’s Cloud Analytics Engine automates network troubleshooting and analysis to reduce operational expenses and maximize efficiency of the network.

The new switches will be delivered in sequence, with the first platform, the QFX10002, available in Q2 2015.

This article was originally posted “Juniper Networks Releases New Data Center Cloud Spine Switches” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.