Security, 5G Top of Mind in Juniper’s Next-Gen Routing Platform

Calling it the most significant upgrade to its MX Series routers in more than a decade, Juniper Networks Tuesday announced the fifth generation of its MX Series 5G Universal Routing Platform.

It includes new software that provides programmability, performance and flexibility for rapid service deployment in the cloud, today and down the road. The platform targets service providers that operate complex networks and will host resource-intensive applications such as 5G and secure SD-WAN-based managed services, the vendor said.

Without a new generation of product, networks and existing infrastructure are sure to become overextended due to these resource-intensive applications as well as an influx of machine data coming from IoT sensors, a distributed telco edge and cloud computing.

Manoj Leelanivas

“Cloud is eating the world, 5G is ramping up, IoT is presenting a host of new challenges, and security teams simply can’t keep up with the sheer volume of cyberattacks on today’s network. One thing service providers should not have to worry about among all this is the unknown of what lies ahead,” said Manoj Leelanivas, executive vice president and chief product officer at Juniper Networks, who’s been in that role since April.

Here’s what’s included in Tuesday’s announcement:

• 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. 

The MX10008 and MX100016 will be available during the second half of the year. Juniper Penta Silicon-powered line cards for the MX960, MX480 and MX240 will be available in the first quarter of 2019. New CUPS support will be available in the first half of next year.