Lucky 7: Juniper’s MPC7E-MRATE card.

As the port speed arms race ramps up in our clients’ data centers we’ve been seeing more and more demand for MPC7E-MRATE cards. We thought it’d be useful provide a little background on the card, its capabilities, and where it might fit in your network.

First, we’ve got to go over the requirements. This is a newer card on the secondary market, and it’s not going to work on some of your legacy equipment. The MPC7E-MRATE requires an MX series chassis with SCBE2 boards, high speed fans, and high capacity powers. The routing engine has to be running JunOS 15.1F6 and higher. All this means you’re not going to able to use that legacy RE-S-2000-4096 with the MPC7E-MRATE. Embrace the change, because the RE-S-1800-16G is getting to be a less expensive option every day, and if you’re going to be blasting packets, you’re going to benefit from a more robust brain in your router. One last thing: you’ll have to set your MX chassis to enhanced-IP or enhanced-ethernet mode before you can use this card, or you’re going to get an FPC misconfiguration error in your logs.

The MPC7E-MRATE is a fixed-port line card capable of 480 Gbps on the MX series router, which is a gusher for one fixed slot. Out of the box it’ll run 40 x 10G on each port at line speed with a breakout cable to link your router with 10G NICs on your servers or top-of-rack switches. It’s easy to configure the ports for 40G QSFP links to something like a QFX5100. If you’d like to run QSFP28 100G links, you can configure up to four ports on the MPC7E-MRATE to run at 100G, or you can mix and match the different ports to run at different speeds, as long as you don’t exceed 240 Gbps on any one of two PICs. The flexibility may come in handy if you’re down streaming at different rates to different devices, or if you want to add different connections in the future.

The MPC7E-MRATE is a really robust option for your network just based on port speed and configurability, but it also supports Hierarchical Quality of Service (HQOS) for configurable subscriber management on the VLAN or port level, if you’re looking to get granular on your network. This is a great option to connect your 10G links and quickly update to 40G or 100G when your upgrade the other parts of your network. We’ve been seeing a lot of great feedback with this one so give us a call if you’re feeling lucky.

Call +1 (415) 230-4353, email us, or click here to chat right now with one of our reps who can discuss your requirements and complete your quote.