Juniper Networks Delivers Unprecedented Automation, Scale, and Performance with New Data Center Cloud Spine Switches

Juniper Networks (NYSE:JNPR), the industry leader in network innovation, today at its 2015 Innovation Showcase introduced the QFX10000 line of spine switches and the new Junos Fusion® for data centers to provide industry-leading 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.

Additional 2015 Innovation Showcase News Highlights

• Juniper today unveiled an enhanced Converged Supercore®, which includes new custom silicon, updates to the PTX router and expanded SDN capabilities via the NorthStar Controller. With these new innovations, Juniper will deliver the industry’s most powerful and optimized core routing platform available to enable service providers to better connect a world amid explosive and unpredictable bandwidth demands.
• Juniper also announced the availability of Express Path, an optimization capability for the SRX5000 Series Services Gateways that will dramatically boost throughput, reduce latency and improve session scalability for enterprises and service providers. This new technology enables the SRX firewall to keep pace with the massive volumes of data traffic on high-performance networks.

Supporting Quotes

"Network performance, automation and scale are key priorities for Equinix, and specifically for our cloud interconnection solution – Equinix Cloud Exchange. With the increasing number of enterprises moving to the cloud, coupled with security and performance concerns, it's imperative that Cloud Exchange and its underlying technology, the Equinix Programmable Network, are based on a highly scalable and automated network architecture. As a valued network provider to Equinix, we're excited to see that Juniper Networks is constantly innovating to meet the expanding network demands of its customers through its latest QFX Series switches."
- Ihab Tarazi, chief technology officer, Equinix

"The proliferation and continuing growth of cloud workloads is driving the need for the next generation of datacenter infrastructure. IDC has found that enterprise and service provider expenditures on infrastructure to deliver cloud services will reach $65 billion in 2017. To accommodate this growing wave of cloud services, datacenter spine switches will have to support 100GbE at high port densities and at scale. At the same time, they will be called upon to feature increasingly sophisticated software capabilities, including programmability, automated management, and advanced analytics. With the release of the QFX10000 line and other key automation and architecture building blocks, Juniper is looking to meet these cloud-driven requirements for brains and brawn in datacenter spine switching.”
- Brad Casemore, research director, Datacenter Networks at IDC

"With the introduction of the QFX10000 line based on the new Q5 chip, Juniper Networks has significantly raised the industry bar in terms of network scale, density and performance. The addition of this new switch line further enhances our existing QFX Series portfolio by providing our customers with complete choice through our open, flexible and highly scalable solutions that serve traditional enterprise data centers to the largest cloud environments.”
- Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president and general manager, Juniper Development and Innovation at Juniper Networks

“As a leading supplier of data center switches, today’s announcement of the QFX10000 line of switches will be an outstanding addition to our data center and cloud switch product portfolio and will be a solid revenue generator for us. More importantly, the QFX10000 line, which incorporates the new Q5 chip, coupled with Junos Fusion for data centers is the kind of innovation we expect from Juniper and we expect it to benefit our customers by providing them with automated, highly scalable network solutions.”
- Leon de Keijzer, chief executive officer, Infradata Group

Additional Resources

• Blog: Juniper Unveils 2015 Innovations in Routing, Switching and Security by Jonathan Davidson
• Blog: QFX10000: When Faster is Not Fast Enough by Brendan Hayes
• Video: Juniper Networks QFX10000 Data Center and Cloud Switches
• Press Release: Juniper Networks Innovation Showcase Features New Lineup of Breakthrough-Performance Networking Products
• Juniper Networks QFX Series of Switches: http://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/switching/qfx-series/
• Juniper.net Community: www.juniper.net/community

About Juniper Networks

Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR) delivers innovation across routing, switching and security. From the network core down to consumer devices, Juniper Networks’ innovations in software, silicon and systems transform the experience and economics of networking. Additional information can be found at Juniper Networks (www.juniper.net) or connect with Juniper on Twitter and Facebook.

Juniper Networks, Junos and Converged Supercore are registered trademarks of Juniper Networks, Inc. in the United States and other countries. The Juniper Networks and Junos logos are trademarks of Juniper Networks, Inc. All other trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve a number of assumptions, uncertainties and risks including, among other things, statements concerning Juniper Networks' prospects, product availability, future products and performance and benefits to customers. Actual results or events could differ materially from those anticipated in those forward-looking statements as a result of certain factors, including delays in scheduled product availability, incompatibility of technologies, the company's failure to accurately predict emerging technological trends, and other factors listed in Juniper Networks’ most recent report on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All statements made in this press release are made only as of the date of this press release. Juniper Networks undertakes no obligation to update the information in this release in the event facts or circumstances subsequently change after the date of this press release. Any future product, feature, enhancement or related specification that may be referenced in this press release are for information purposes only, are subject to change at any time without notice and are not commitments to deliver any future product, feature, enhancement or related specification. The information contained in this press release is intended to outline Juniper Networks’ general product direction and should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision.

¹ Dell’Oro Group, Ethernet Switch Market Update Q3 2014