Juniper Networks has announced the the QFX5700, a new 5RU chassis switch for the data center or campus. The new switch runs on Broadcom’s Trident 4 chipset, and supports a wide range of line cards and interfaces: 10, 25, 40, 50, 100, 200, and 400G. Juniper says the QFX5700 delivers total bandwidth of 25.6Tbps.
Juniper says the switch can meet a variety of use cases for enterprises, service providers, and cloud providers. If you want port density, you can fill the chassis with line cards supporting 10G or 25G interfaces. If you want high-speed interfaces on a border switch pointing at your WAN, you can stock it with 400G. Or if you want to work your way up to 400G over time by swapping out line cards, the QFX5700 can grow with you.
The switch supports inline MACsec encryption, and can be run by Juniper’s Apstra intent-based networking software.
QFX5700 Front View. Source: Juniper Networks
The switch runs the Junos Evolved network OS, a redesigned version of Junos that runs on native Linux whereas Junos runs on FreeBSD. Junos Evolved uses a modular architecture in which applications and services communicate via a pub-sub model and share state with a central database. You can run multiple versions of the Junos Evolved software on the same device, as well as third-party Linux applications. Note that Junos Evolved changes some operational behaviors and naming conventions from Junos. More details about Junos Evolved are here.
Does A Chassis Fit Into A Leaf-Spine World?
As mentioned, Juniper is touting this chassis as perfectly suitable for a leaf-spine architecture, whether as a spine switch, super-spine, or border leaf.
A typical leaf-spine design uses fixed-form-factor switches rather than chassis switches for a variety of reasons: if a single 1RU or 2RU switch goes bad, that limits your failure domain. It’s also easy to swap out individual leaves and spines to upgrade to the next generation of silicon. You can also buy hardware and software from separate vendors. With a chassis, you’re locked in to a single vendor’s hardware and network OS.
That said, Juniper sees a place for chassis switches in a leaf-spine design, and has the customers to prove it. “We do have cloud companies today that are all chassis-based,” says Mike Bushong, VP of Data Center Product Management at Juniper.
“On the enterprise side, the drive is the mixed speeds” he says. “You buy something today and can credibly deploy a path that takes you to 400G. On the service provider side, service providers looking at 5G deployments or telco clouds have a need for dense 100G or 200G.”
In other words, Juniper customers have use cases, and Juniper isn’t interested in a religious debate about chassis vs. fixed form factor.
The QFX5700 is expected to ship in the fourth quarter of 2021.
