Comparing Juniper MX PREM Models.

Juniper’s MX Series BASE, PREMIUM, PREMIUM2, and PREMIUM3: What’s the Difference?

Climbing the Juniper MX Series Mountain

We’re often asked “What are the differences among the PREM, PREM2, and PREM3 versions on the Juniper MX Series?” It’s a pretty good question, one which Juniper’s website seems to consider a state secret. It’s weird that sometimes you need a half dozen sherpas to trek the Rosetta Stone through these tech websites just to get a simple answer. We’re going to help you climb that mountain and translate those hieroglyphs here at Terabit Systems. Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up, using the MX480 as an example.*

BASE Camp is simple. The MX480-BASE-AC is a standard MX chassis with one switch control board (MX-SCB), one 1.3GHz routing engine with 2GB of RAM (RE-S-1300-2048), and a pair of 1200 Watt power supplies (PWR-1200-AC). This is where all good climbers earn their spikes.

We’ve got an article delineating the differences between the MX Series BASE bundles and the PREMIUM ones, the latter of which basically upgrades the BASE components and makes them redundant: two SCBs and two RE-S-2000-4096 routing engines, boasting 2GHz processors and 4GB of RAM (twice that of the base bundle), along with four 1200 Watt powers for a boost in performance and full redundancy. This MX480-PREMIUM-AC is going to let you leave base camp and get into the deep snow.

There’s still a lot of mountain out there, but don’t get your crampons in a bunch. The MX480-PREMIUM2-AC takes advantage of a more robust routing engine, the RE-1800X4-16G, which has a Quad-Core 1.8GHz processor and 16GB of RAM running inside an SCBE (“E” for enhanced). The PREMIUM2 also runs hotter, so Juniper includes the HC (or High Capacity) fan tray to help chill that avalanche of data. All these improvements make the PREMIUM2 is abominably powerful.  

In the rarified air of the mountaintop, you’re going to get peak performance from the MX-480-PREMIUM3-AC bundle, which runs redundant RE-S-1800X4-32Gs (including 32GB of RAM to hold all those BGP tables) and superfast MX-SCBE2s, along with four total 2500 Watt power supplies. That lightheadedness? These things will suck the air out of the data center. They’ll stop a yeti in its tracks.

We’re going to follow up with a post on the specs for the SCBs, but the table below will spell out the basic features. Keep in mind that we can tweak these bundles for you, providing the individual parts in whatever combinations you’d like, including units with DC Powers.

Happy routing.

*Note that the specs on the MX240-PREMIUM3-AC includes two 2500W PEMs, since that provides full redundancy on those units.