Juniper Unveils QFX5100 Family Of DC Access Switches

Juniper Networks has announced its flagship QFX5100 family of datacentre access switches which enable customers to achieve increased network performance, greater operational flexibility and higher availability. A foundational element of the Juniper Networks MetaFabric Architecture, the new QFX5100 family provides tremendous architectural flexibility for the hitless, zero downtime datacentre. New innovations in the Junos operating system (OS) enable the QFX5100 family to deliver the industry’s most advanced availability features to help organisations deliver maximum application uptime. In addition, the QFX5100 family offers the most comprehensive suite of Layer 2 and Layer 3 features available in this class of switching products.

The QFX5100 family is the world’s most nimble family of top-of-rack (ToR) switches for datacentre environments that need to handle distributed applications and virtualised workloads resulting from the proliferation of data. The QFX5100 enables:

The QFX5100 family can be deployed within multiple fabric architecture options, allowing customers to address their current and future business needs while retaining complete investment protection. The QFX5100 family supports existing Juniper architectures including Virtual Chassis and QFabric – scaling from two to 128 nodes – as well as new and innovative architectures, such as Virtual Chassis Fabric. Because the QFX5100 utilises open interfaces, it can support additional fabric architectures, such as Leaf/Spine and Layer 3-based designs.

As the industry’s only ToR switch offering Topology-independent In-Service Software Upgrade capabilities (TISSU), the QFX5100 family allows network administrators to perform software upgrades without impacting application delivery. In addition, the QFX5100 starts up quickly for high availability and reduced failover times.

The QFX5100 family includes an array of features for simplified management through Junos OS, Junos Space Network Director and Network Director APIs. This enables Zero Touch Provisioning and orchestration with OpenStack, CloudStack, Puppet and Chef.

The QFX5100 provides dynamic buffer utilisation monitoring and reporting to provide detailed insight and data on network traffic that allows network administrators to make informed network design decisions and identify network hotspots proactively.

The QFX5100 provides rich Layer 2 and Layer 3 features, including MPLS, BGP Add-Path, L3VPN and FCoE support. In addition, it supports network overlays including VXLAN and eventually NVGRE, as well as SDN controllers, such as Juniper Networks Contrail and VMware NSX.

“Guided by Juniper’s MetaFabric architecture for an open, smart, and simple datacentre, the QFX5100 family of switches delivers the right network building blocks for increased business agility and scale. Whether the datacentre is a single site or part of a global network, Juniper’s QFX5100 switches provide the most nimble and highly available solution for small, medium and large scale environments,” said Jonathan Davidson, senior vice president and general manager, Campus and Datacentre Business Unit, Juniper Networks.