Juniper has revealed the latest juniper EX9200 switch programmable core switch for 10, 40 and 100Gbps software defined networks. This EX9200 is being released as a replacement for customers who are using EX8200 who are looking for 40/100G Ethernet and SDN programmability. Juniper has also said that their previous version EX8200 line cards were not compatible like that of the latest juniper EX9200 switch.
Juniper senior director Dhritiman Dasgupta had said that though the upgrade sounds drastic EX8200 is a successful product for lower density markets and he added saying “we did not have a solution for very high speed densities.” He also said that juniper does not yet have a migration or trade in program from EX8200 to EX9200 but is working on one.
Dasgupta also said
The EX9200 juniper switch is based on Juniper’s MX edge router rather than the EX switch. It runs that same 3+-year-old One/Trio ASIC as the MX and form factors are identical, but chassis, line cards, switch fabric, routing engines and software are not.
Only power supplies, fan trays, air filters and power cables are interchangeable components between the Juniper switch EX9200 and MX router, he says. New guts were necessary to bring the MX-based EX9200 down to a switch price point, he says – functionally-enriched routers cost much more than switches.
Juniper went with the MX technology instead of the EX switch platform for the juniper switch EX9200 due to the programmability of the Trio ASIC.
“We would not have been able to deliver that” with the EX platform, he says.
He also said that EX8200 was not at all designed for 40/100G Ethernet. Customers were also aware of the fact that EX8200 was not 100G ready devices. Juniper also informed there resellers and channel partners to advice and reassure their clients that juniper will continue to give their full support and investment on EX8200 and also will aid in the migration of Ex8200 to its latest version EX9200, this information is available as some sources have revealed.
Dasgupta has assured that in future many software enhancements will be made with EX8200 model. Coming to the EX9200 Juniper Switch, has also future plans on development on QFabric Interconnect, the core of Juniper’s QFabric single-tier data centre fabric switching system. Sources also say QFabric will remain Juniper’s lead platform for single-tier fabrics.
The majority of QFabric top-of-rack switches – called “nodes” in the QFabric architecture – already have 40G uplinks, Dasgupta added.
QFabric will be positioned as the alternative to Cisco’s Nexus 7000 with “F” series cards, which are optimized for high-density, low-power, shallow buffers and limited features, sources say. Juniper EX9200 switch will be positioned against the Nexus 7000 “M” series in the data center, and against Cisco’s Catalyst 6500E and HP’s 7500/10500/12500 switches in the campus core with large physical or logical scale, and/or 40/100G requirements, they say.
Basic Information on Juniper EX9200 Switch:
The EX9200 line cards support Gigabit, 10 Gigabit, and 40 Gigabit Ethernet ports today, and will support 100 Gigabit ports later this year. There are three modular enclosures and four line cards that are available now.
The Juniper EX9200 switch fabric delivers up to 240Gb/sec per slot at full duplex and the midplane in the top-end EX9214 delivers up to 13.2Tb/sec of bandwidth and supports 1 million MAC addresses and up to 32,000 VLANs.
The Juniper EX9200 switch has a bit more aggregate bandwidth compared to the prior generation EX8200 modular switches, it scales down to smaller configurations, and is a lot more dense physically.
The base list price of the Juniper EX9200 switch is $80,000.
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