MPLS Feature Support on QFX Series

MPLS Feature Support on QFX Series

A customer who has a few dozen sites with distances of 60-120 km between them recently asked about MPLS equipment.

MPLS Simplified Application
While routers in a traditional network each perform an IP lookup to determine the next hop, the first device in an MPLS network does a routing lookup for the final destination and adds a label to the packets. As they pass through other MPLS routers in the path, packets are quickly routed along using the label. At the final destination, the label is removed.

As our customer is running MX series routers, I dug a bit and found that although a number of Juniper switches are capable of running a subset of MPLS, the QFX5100 is the industry’s only compact, low-latency, high-density, low-power switch to offer an MPLS feature set.

After looking at the options, we recommended the QFX5100-48S-AFO with QFX-JSL-EDGE-ADV1.  It’s a compact 1U 10GbE data center access switch with 48 small form-factor pluggable and pluggable plus (SFP/SFP+) transceiver ports and six quad SFP+ (QSFP+) ports. Dual AC or DC powered versions are available. And with the ADV1 loaded, it enables IS-IS, BGP, VxLAN and MPLS of course. Bang for Buck, it is the best option we found.

There is a voluminous amount of information on the subject so I’d suggest doing some light reading (source). 

Let me know if you have any questions. You can reach me via email at raul@terabitsystems.com or call me at +1 (415) 504-1145.