Juniper’s MX240: Choosing an MX Starter Home

Juniper’s MX240: Choosing an MX Starter Home

We’ve been talking up Juniper’s QFX series lately, because it’s a great fixed switch with some useful options in a 1RU platform. With the right licenses you can turn a QFX into a pretty good entry-level router, but those licenses can get spendy, and the QFX is better used in a leaf spine configuration, or just as a straight low latency/high density standalone. If you’re looking for a router at a good price with any number of port options and a mighty RIB that can hold multiple tables, make like Ewan McGregor. Choose a starter home. Choose your future. Choose the MX240.

Juniper’s been selling these MX units for a little while now, and they’ve got it down. The MX240 is a compact five rack-unit router that can go any way you want it. You can go full starter home with the legacy SCB + RE-S-2000 and have a nice little router like a one bed condo. You’d furnish it with some 1200 watt powers and up two three MPC-3D-16XGE-SFPP line cards to make a comfy little router. It’ll run copper ports, too, so you can hook up some legacy hardware along with a good number of 10G servers, and you can lounge, knowing that the foundation is steady, and the roof will hold. You might be on the ground floor, but a setup like that’s going at a reasonable price. This is a house for any budget.

But you're getting a router to –route–, and it isn’t much of a budget stretch to get a house you won’t have to move out of right away. If you think you're going to stay a while, it might do to pick a home that can grow with you. Consider starting out or upgrading to the MX240 with an SCBE, RE-S-1800-8 or RE-S-1800-16, some high-speed fans, and some cards that really move packets. With faster routing engines and fans, you can furnish the MX240 with just about any kind of line card, from the MPC4E-3D-32XGE-SFPP for port density, to the MPC7E-MRATE for fixed 40G, and all the way up to 100G ports with something like the MPC4E-3D-2CGE-8XGE or the MPC5EQ-100G10G. With the faster base components, you can move into a routing house with some elbow room, and you can put on an addition with an extra or more powerful line card down the road, laying the foundation for a high-powered, flexible future.

We’ve been moving some MX480s and MX960s lately, and those are phenomenal routers with a lot of backplane capacity, but they’re also –big–, taking up a good deal of rack space and gobbling up a lot of power. Don’t worry, we can put in a roomy home at the data center with an MX480, or sell you a mansion with the MX960, but if you’re looking for a way to move packets at a price you can afford, the MX240 is going to do everything those bigger units can in a tighter space, and with a smaller power budget.

The MX240, with its flexible modular configuration and its vast array of options, puts you in a pretty good neighborhood at a great price. Call Terabit for your move-in special at +1 (415) 230-4353 or click here to send us an email.