[j-nsp] high 10GE port density in EX switch?

[Eugeniu Patrascu]

On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 4:13 AM, Michel de Nostredame
<d.nostra at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi There~
>
> One of my customers has some Cisco Nexus 7K but budget wise prevents
> him from buying N7K in new locations. His environment is pretty simple
> and straight forward. Lots of 10GE ports (around 2200 ports) divide
> into around 30+ VLANs. Then uplink to two MX routers (the border) and
> go to Internet.
>
> Previous setups were using N5K as L2 access switch and aggregate to
> N7K as core L3 switch, then multiple 10GE L3 uplinks to MX480. The N7K
> is doing VLAN routing and lots (total 3+ thousand lines) of ACL.
>
> The QFX total solution looks pretty interesting, but does not have too
> significant price difference compares to Nexus solution.
>
> Will Juniper ship new switch fabric on EX 8000 series to support
> line-rate high port density 10GE? (for example, 40 port line rate 10GE
> per slot.)
>

If you do not really need line rate 40 x 10Gbps ports you can go with
EX8200-40XS and fill a 8216 with them. It's oversubscribed 5:1 in 5x8
port groups.
Another option for a lot of 10G ports would be a stack of EX4500
switches, but you would still be limited by the Virtual Chassis
available bandwidth (128Gbps Half-Duplex) - but if you can get some
flexibility as you can try to mix and match servers that talk to each
other on the same switch in order to have line rate 10G traffic and
avoid VC traffic. You can use the up-link modules to populate them
with 10G ports and do a MC-LAG to the MXs.

Even with the QFabric, you would still need to run a lot of 40G
interconnect ports in order to have a high throughput fabric
backplane.

Other vendor that might do (you should check with them) full line rate
40+ 10GbE ports is Brocade with the new VDX 8770-8 switch (they claim
4Tbps/slot and 384 ports per 15U chassis).

HTH.