High-Density, Low Latency. Juniper’s QFX3500 Switch Simply Rocks!

June 2019 Edit: We've updated our thoughts on the QFX line in a new blog entry here:

3 REASONS THE JUNIPER QFX SWITCH SHOULD BE PART OF YOUR DATA CENTER NETWORK​

Heads spin when considering all the capabilities of the new Juniper QFX3500 “multipurpose” low-latency switch. At the most fundamental level, it’s a high-density 10GbE/40Gb SFP/SFP+/QSFP+ standalone switch running Junos, in a 1RU package. But this switch goes way beyond that.  The QFX3500 can be configured as a standalone switch, a Node device in a QFabric system, or as a member of a Virtual Chassis.

As to the ports, forty-eight 10-Gbps ports in the device use small form-factor pluggable plus (SFP+) transceivers and operate by default as 10-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. Optionally, you can choose to configure up to 12 of the ports as 2-Gbps, 4-Gbps, or 8-Gbps Fiber Channel (FC) interfaces, and up to 36 of the ports as 1-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. When used as a standalone switch, four 40-Gbps uplink ports in the device use quad small form-factor pluggable plus (QSFP+) to four SFP+ copper breakout cables to support an additional 15 10-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.

But wait, here is where it gets really exciting, 40GB ports! The QFX3500 switch has four uplink ports (Q0 through Q3) that support up to four QSFP+ transceivers, as well as QSFP+ DAC or DAC breakout cables. When the QFX3500 device is used as a standalone switch, these uplink ports are configured by default as 15 10-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. If you want to use them as 40-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, you simply run Junos OS Release 12.2X50-D20 or later and you now have 40-Gigabit Ethernet!

This switch can do a lot:

• High-performance L2/L3 access switch
• L3 aggregation switch
• FCOE transit switch
• FCOE-FC gateway
• Low-latency peering router between COLO and market exchange
• Fabric edge solution for QFabric, and so on.

Terabit Systems was lucky enough to get a significant quantity of these switches, and while List price is just over US$34,000, we are discounting them substantially. These units are new in opened boxes. Never deployed, just ready for a new home! Call us at +1 (415) 230-4353 or email us today for pricing.