Juniper Networks is accelerating its MX router portfolio with a series of new updates.
First announced in 2012, the MX 2020 router is enclosed in a 7-foot chassis with 20 slots for network cards. Juniper announced the 10-slot MX 2010 at the same time as the MX 2020.
Tom Jacobs, senior director of service provider marketing at Juniper Networks, explained to Enterprise Networking Planet that his company is now announcing new line cards that boost MX capacity in different ways.
“Applicable to the MX2010 and 2020 platforms, we’ve announced the MPC6 card that brings 520G capacity per slot, ” Jacobs said.
There is also a new switch fabric module for other Juniper MX 3D routers, providing more performance across Juniper’s edge routing product portfolio.
“The SCBE2, the new switch fabric for the MX960/480/240, provides up to 400G full duplex switching capacity per slot,” Jacobs said. “For the MX960, that means a fully redundant system could support up to 8.8Tb in a half-rack MX960.”
Juniper now also has 100 and 40 Gigabit high-density line cards for existing MX routers as well.
“The MPC4e and MPC5e provide up to 260Gbps line cards of varying features and QoS capabilities, with higher-density interfaces for 10G, 40G and 100G,” Jacobs said.
SDN
Juniper describes its enhanced MX router lineup as “SDN-Ready.” Jacobs explained that the MX router lineup has built-in SDN capabilities for programmability through the Junos Trio chipset to allow network operators to accommodate future protocols.
“The MX line supports OpenFlow and integrates with Contrail, which uses standards-based protocols like BGP,” Jacobs said. “We leverage things like PCE and netconf-yang to place the MX family in a great position to take advantage of what’s to come.”
Juniper recently released its Contrail SDN controller as an open source effort.
Jacobs added that using the blades on the MX routers, administrators can virtualize various functions and services like content caching, DPI and firewalls.
“We’re going to continue executing on our investment-protection and capacity-scaling strategy to meet the ever growing needs of our service providers/cable operator customers,” Jacobs said. “These routers have additional headroom for added capacity down the road. The MX2020 can scale to an industry-leading 80TB; we’re currently at 10.4TB.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
