Juniper Networks is a leader in the networking industry and their QFX-5700 Switch stands as one of the most powerful switches currently on the market. If you’re looking to upgrade your network, this piece of hardware might be just what you need. This article will explore everything that you need to know about the Juniper QFX-5700 Switch, including its features, benefits, and more. Whether you’re an IT professional looking to upgrade your existing system or someone just getting into the world of networking, this article will provide all the information you need to properly evaluate the switch.

What is the JUNIPER QFX-5700 Switch?

The QFX5700 Switch offers a high-density, cost-optimized, 5 U 400GbE, 8-slot fabric-less modular platform, ideal for data centers where capacity and cloud services are being added as business needs grow. These services require higher network bandwidth per rack, as well as flexibility, making the 10/25/40/50/100/200/400GbE interface options of the QFX5700 switch ideal for server and intra-fabric connectivity. The QFX5700 is an optimal choice for spine-and-leaf deployments in enterprise, service provider, and cloud provider data centers.

Coupled with the widespread adoption of overlay technologies, the QFX5700 lays a strong foundation for your evolving business and network needs, offering deployment versatility to future-proof your network investment.

Increased Scale and Buffer

The QFX5700 provides enhanced scale with up to 1.24 million routes, 80,000 firewall filters, and 160,000 media access control (MAC) addresses. It supports high numbers of egress IPv4/IPv6 rules by programming matches in egress ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) along with ingress TCAM.

132MB Shared Packet Buffer

Today’s cloud-native applications have a critical dependency on buffer size to prevent congestion and packet drops. The QFX5700 has a 132 MB shared packet buffer that is allocated dynamically to congested ports.

Programmability

The QFX5700 revolutionizes performance for data center networks by providing a programmable software-defined pipeline in addition to the comprehensive feature set provided in the Juniper Networks QFX5120 Switch line. The QFX5700 uses a compiler-driven switch data plane with full software program control to enable and serve a diverse set of use cases, including in-band telemetry, fine-grained filtering for traffic steering, traffic monitoring, and support for new protocol encapsulations.

Power Efficiency

With its low-power 7nm technology, a fully loaded and fully redundant QFX5700 consumes typically 2,870 W, bringing improvements in speed, less power consumption, and higher density on a chip.

What are the features and benefits of using this switch?

• Automation and programmability: The QFX5700 supports several network automation features for plug-and-play operations, including zero-touch provisioning (ZTP), Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF), Juniper Extension Toolkit (JET), Junos telemetry interface, operations and event scripts, automation rollback, and Python scripting.
• Cloud-level scale and performance: The QFX5700 supports best-in-class cloud-scale L2/L3 deployments with a low latency of 630 ns and superior scale and performance. This includes L2 support for 160,000 MAC addresses and Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) learning, which scales up to 64,000 entries at 500 frames per second. It also includes L3 support for 1.24 million longest prefix match (LPM) routes and 160,000 host routes on IPv4.

Additionally, the QFX5700 supports 610,000 LPM routes and 80,000 host routes on IPv6, 128-way equal-cost multipath (ECMP) routes, and a filter that supports 80,000 ingresses and 18,000 egresses exactly match filtering rules. The QFX5700 supports up to 128 link aggregation groups, 4096 VLANs, and Jumbo frames of 9216 bytes. Junos OS Evolved provides configurable options through a CLI, enabling each QFX5700 to be optimized for different deployment scenarios.

• VXLAN overlays: The QFX5700 is capable of both L2 and L3 gateway services. Customers can deploy overlay networks to provide L2 adjacencies for applications over L3 fabrics. The overlay networks use VXLAN in the data plane and EVPN or Open vSwitch Database (OVSDB) for programming the overlays, which can operate without a controller or be orchestrated with an SDN controller.
• IEEE 1588 PTP Boundary Clock with Hardware Timestamping: IEEE 1588 PTP transparent/boundary clock is supported on QFX5700, enabling accurate and precise sub-microsecond timing information in today’s data center networks. In addition, the QFX5700 supports hardware timestamping; timestamps in Precision Time Protocol (PTP) packets are captured and inserted by an onboard field-programmable gate array (FPGA) on the switch at the physical (PHY) level.
• Data packet timestamping: When the optional data packet timestamping feature is enabled, select packets flowing through the QFX5700 are timestamped with references to the recovered PTP clock. When these packets are received by nodes in the network, the timestamping information can be mirrored onto monitoring tools to identify network bottlenecks that cause latency. This analysis can also be used for legal and compliance purposes in institutions such as financial trading, video streaming, and research establishments.
• RoCEv2: As a switch capable of transporting data as well as storage traffic over Ethernet, the QFX5700 provides an IEEE data center bridging (DCB) converged network between servers with disaggregated flash storage arrays or an NVMe-enabled storage-area network (SAN). The QFX5700 offers a full-featured DCB implementation that provides strong monitoring capabilities on the top-of-rack switch for SAN and LAN administration teams to maintain a clear separation of management. The RDMA over Converged Ethernet version 2 (RoCEv2) transit switch functionality, including priority-based flow control (PFC) and Data Center Bridging Capability Exchange (DCBX), are included as part of the default software.
• Junos Evolved features: The QFX5700 switch supports features such as L2/L3 unicast, EVPN-VXLAN*, BGP add-path, RoCEv2 and congestion management, multicast, 128- way ECMP, dynamic load balancing capabilities, enhanced firewall capabilities, and monitoring.
• Junos OS Evolved Architecture: Junos OS Evolved is a native Linux operating system that incorporates a modular design of independent functional components and enables individual components to be upgraded independently while the system remains operational. Component failures are localized to the specific component involved and can be corrected by upgrading and restarting that specific component without having to bring down the entire device.

The switches control and data plane processes can run in parallel, maximizing CPU utilization, providing support for containerization, and enabling application deployment using LXC or Docker.

• Retained state: State is the retained information or status about physical and logical entities. It includes both operational and configuration state, comprising committed configuration, interface state, routes, hardware state, and what is held in a central database called the distributed data store (DDS). State information remains persistent, is shared across the system, and is supplied during restarts.
• Feature support: All key networking functions such as routing, bridging, management software, and management plane interfaces, as well as APIs such as CLI, NETCONF, JET, Junos telemetry interface, and the underlying data models, resemble those supported by the Junos operating system. This ensures compatibility and eases the transition to Junos Evolved.

The Different Types of JUNIPER QFX-5700 Switches

The QFX5700 can be deployed as a universal device in cloud data centers to support 100GbE server access and 400GbE spine-and-leaf configurations, optimizing data center operations by using a single device across multiple network layers. The QFX5700 can also be deployed in more advanced overlay architectures like an EVPN-VXLAN fabric. Depending on where tunnel terminations are desired, the QFX5700 can be deployed in either a centrally routed or edge-routed architecture.

Conclusion

The Juniper QFX-5700 switch powerful and reliable piece of hardware that can help facilitate the smooth operation of your network. With its advanced features such as support for 10GBASE-T, dynamic power saving, and multiple management tools, this switch is an excellent choice for businesses looking to upgrade their networks. By understanding all the components and capabilities of this impressive switch you’ll be able to make sure it’s up to the job no matter how demanding your requirements are.