The next round of crazy upgrades in the data center network will be 400Gbps Ethernet, and Juniper Networks has also launched its own roadmap.
The next round of crazy upgrades in the data center network will be 400Gbps Ethernet, and Juniper Networks has also launched its own roadmap.
This year is a 400 Gbps announcement year. Arista and February reported that it is expected to launch a trial deployment of its 400Gbps suite from next year, while Mellanox and Marvell Semiconductor have announced efforts to develop 400Gbps chips.
But this does not leave Juniper Networks behind: there is still plenty of time to win customers before GM’s 400Gbps is widely adopted, and the industry generally believes that 100Gbps and 400Gbps will overlap.
Juniper’s roadmap covers IP transport routing, data center switches, and WAN service routers.
The engine behind the Juniper 400Gbps program is Juniper’s June 2018 announcement of a chip called Penta, a 16-nm packet forwarding engine that emits Gigabits per second at 0.5 watts, compared to the predecessor of the Penta chip. The Junos Trio chipset is 50% higher. Penta embeds MACsec and IPsec encryption to support the Optical Network Forum’s FlexE protocol, which provides link binding and channelization.
Juniper Networks announced in its announcement on Tuesday that it will produce next-generation ExpressPlus and Q5 chips for the 400Gbps transition.
The new generation of ExpressPlus and Q5 chips will appear first among the three products:
- Three-rack unit router PTX10003 packet transmission router: 160 PCI interfaces with the speed of 400Gbps, support for 32 interfaces of FlexE with speed of 400Gbps, including universal multi-rate QSFP-DD (quad-core small-dual density) module. The PTX10003 is expected to ship in the second half of this year.
- QFX data center functionality will provide 400Gbps support starting in the second half of this year and the first half of 2019. In addition, the QFX10003 32 x 400Gbps 3RU switch based on the new Q5 chip will have a capacity of 160 100Gbps interfaces; the single-rack unit QFX5220 switch will have 32 400Gbps interfaces supporting 50Gbps and 100Gbps connections.
- The MX Series routing platform announced in June will be equipped with a Penta line card, allowing 400Gbps Ethernet to be used on the MX960, MX480 and MX240 models.
Manoj Leelanivas, executive vice president and chief product officer, mentioned in Bowen that the 100Gbps tail will encounter an ever-increasing 400Gbps port product by the end of 2021, and he expects 40Gbps to be reduced by then.
Leelanivas said that the 400Gbps suite will result in a drop in the current 2 x 50Gbps typical server connection price and is already moving towards 2 x 100Gbps, “more than 11% year-on-year growth over the past decade.”