Arista DCS-7060CX-32S-R and Juniper QFX5200-32C: 100G delivered

As 2020 saw slowly growing demand for 100G switching in the secondary market, 2021 has seen Arista price jumps at 2x to 3x in comparison to the year before. Dense, smaller 1RU 100G switches from Juniper, like the Juniper QFX5200-32C, remain more expensive than the similarly spec’d Arista DCS-7060CX-32S-R. Both OEM offerings provide 100Gbe, 40Gbe, 4x10Gbe, 4x25Gbe, or 2x50Gbe support with only slight differences in delivery.

Buffering in the Arista lineup is supported at 16 MB with the DCS-7060CX, but then expands to 22MB with the DCS-7060CX2 version.  Juniper QFX5200-32C buffering maxes out at 16 MB.

The main difference between OEMs comes to applications, where the DCS-7060CXs win in pure latency focus at 450ns for L2 and limited L3 features. Juniper’s interesting feature set allows for the QFX5200-32C to also be run as a low latency MPLS label-switching router (LSR) or MPLS provider edge (PE) router in small scale environments. We’ve supported a few ISP clients looking for this specific focus. The biggest challenge with great little 100G boxes like these: keeping them in stock!

Contact me directly with questions or assistance with quotes: 

Daniel Lobanovsky 
daniel@terabitsystems.com 
+1 (415) 483-1189