New innovations in the Junos® operating system (OS) enable the QFX5100 family to deliver the industry’s most advanced availability features to help organizations 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.
• Enabling IT Transformation – The QFX5100 family is the world’s most nimble family of top-of-rack (ToR) switches for data center environments that need to handle distributed applications and virtualized workloads resulting from the proliferation of data. The QFX5100 enables:
o Flexible Deployment Options: 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 utilizes open interfaces, it can support additional fabric architectures, such as Leaf/Spine and Layer 3-based designs.
o Hitless Data Center Operations: 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.
o Automation and Orchestration: 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.
o Insight Technology for Advanced Analytics: The QFX5100 provides dynamic buffer utilization 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.
o Advanced Software Capabilities: 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.
• Partner Ecosystem – The introduction of the QFX5100 family strengthens Juniper’s data center switching portfolio, providing partners with greater flexibility to build solutions that integrate with existing and new Juniper Networks fabric architectures. Juniper partners can now have more opportunities to speed time to revenue and gain competitive advantage.