Juniper Networks Unveils Next-Gen Routing Platform

Juniper Penta Silicon: At the heart of the MX Series 5G Platform is the new Juniper Penta Silicon, a next-generation, 16nm service-optimized, packet-forwarding engine that delivers a 50 percent power efficiency gain (0.5 watts per gigabit) over the existing Junos Trio chipset. That leads to a tripling of bandwidth for the MX960, MX480 and MX240. Juniper Penta enables end-to-end, secure connectivity at scale with native support of both MACsec and an IPsec crypto engine that can originate and terminate thousands of IPSec sessions without sacrificing performance. Additionally, Juniper Penta supports flexible native Ethernet (FlexE). 

MX 5G Control User-Plane Separation (CUPS) Hardware Acceleration: As service providers prepare for 5G deployments, the 3GPP CUPS standard allows customers to separate the evolved packet core user plane (GTP-U) and control plane (GTP-C) with a standardized Sx interface to help service providers scale each independently as needed for added flexibility and investment protection. The MX Series 5G platform is the first networking platform to support a standard-based, hardware-accelerated 5G user plane in both existing and future MX routers to enable converged services (wireless and wireline) on the same platform while also allowing integration with third-party 5G control planes. Juniper expects this will lower total cost of ownership by as much as three to four times over software-based user-plane implementations for MXs deployed in the field.

MX10008 and MX10016 Universal Chassis: The previously announced PTX and QFX Universal Chassis gains two new MX variants: the MX10008 and MX10016. Juniper’s Universal Chassis family offers operators a single-chassis design. The 13-RU MX10008 and 21-RU MX10016 Universal Chassis bring space-saving scale for edge routers at 19.2 Tbps and 38.4 Tbps, respectively. These new additions to Juniper’s Universal Chassis family improve per-slot economics for service scale at ~0.6 watts per gigabit, enabling customers to do more with less while simplifying network design and reducing opex. A variety of line cards and software are available to satisfy specific networking use cases across the data center, enterprise and WAN.