June 4, 2010 at 16:57Not Cisco Unified: Juniper Networks EX8200 Series Modular Switches
In our previous article, about the incredible Voltaire Infiniband switch, we promised to talk a little about the distribution-level switches Juniper Networks, also used in the cloud project of our partners, the company Oversan-Skalaksi. Today, in anticipation of the weekend, we are happy to keep our promise.
Juniper Networks is not as well known to a wide audience as, for example, Cisco. This happens because the company does not produce entry-level products and does not have a “household” unit such as Linksys. Juniper products are mainly aimed at large telecommunication companies, operators and providers of various services. At the same time, the annual turnover of Juniper exceeds $ 3 billion. Not weak, right? For a company that only serious system engineers in large integrators and multinational corporations know. Against this background, it was very surprising to see Juniper Networks advertising on video panels at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. Apparently, the company was thinking about increasing brand awareness or something else similar and equally beloved by marketers. Someone punchy is building a career, not otherwise.
By the way, the European office of the company is located in Amsterdam, we were there on a visit in early March, about which we published a report on the blog.
But back to our switches. The EX8200 Series comes with two modular chassis, with 8 and 16 modules. They occupy no less, 14 and 21 units in the rack, respectively. Sizes can be imagined. The total throughput of the switching board, backplane, is 3.1 and 6.2 Terabits, respectively. Not 50, like the Voltaire Infiniband matrix, but also impressive. Each module accounts for up to 320 Gb / s. The chassis can have up to 768 gigabit Ethernet ports, or up to 128 10-gigabit ports.
Up to six hot-swappable power supplies can be installed in each chassis to implement N + N or N + 1 redundancy schemes. The operating system of the switch is Junos own development (as far as I know, FreeBSD was the main system). Switches provide work with 160 thousand MAC addresses and are able to organize up to 4096 VLAN subnets.
Oversan-Skalaxi uses the eight-module EX8208 chassis. Their main task is to receive external and inter-client traffic. That is, through the switches traffic flows from clients to the outside and vice versa. With the help of switches, traffic can be easily passed through a firewall on multiservice gateways (SRX3600 from Juniper) or organize a VLAN to isolate segments or individual clients. This is useful, for example, for organizing a quarantine VLAN in case of a DDoS attack on one of the clients - in this case it will not affect the others.
The two switches are connected by a 40-gigabit optical channel, so traffic, in principle, does not have to be “cooked” in only one switch; data is easy to drive back and forth, as appropriate. At the same speed, the switches are connected to the Voltaire Infiniband-matrix: on their shoulders lies the organization of interaction between clients and storage.
And finally, switches can be used to organize quality of service (QoS). Depending on client agreements, using QoS you can organize a transparent prioritization of traffic and mark the necessary traffic as a priority, achieving guaranteed bandwidth. This feature can be very useful, for example, in VoIP applications.
The story turned out to be quite short due to the inability to fully reveal the specifics of using these serious devices, but in this case too, we express the hope that it turned out to be interesting. The rest will be told by photos for us. The switches are photographed during the installation process.
General form. Only three modules are installed.
Close-up. On the left is a removable vertical fan module.
Modules close up. As in any powerful chassis, copper and optics are quietly adjacent.
Second switch closeup.
Places for power supplies. Below is the Juniper SRX3600 multi-service gateway.
Powerful load balancer from F5. His turn will come.
Juniper Networks is not as well known to a wide audience as, for example, Cisco. This happens because the company does not produce entry-level products and does not have a “household” unit such as Linksys. Juniper products are mainly aimed at large telecommunication companies, operators and providers of various services. At the same time, the annual turnover of Juniper exceeds $ 3 billion. Not weak, right? For a company that only serious system engineers in large integrators and multinational corporations know. Against this background, it was very surprising to see Juniper Networks advertising on video panels at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. Apparently, the company was thinking about increasing brand awareness or something else similar and equally beloved by marketers. Someone punchy is building a career, not otherwise.
By the way, the European office of the company is located in Amsterdam, we were there on a visit in early March, about which we published a report on the blog.
But back to our switches. The EX8200 Series comes with two modular chassis, with 8 and 16 modules. They occupy no less, 14 and 21 units in the rack, respectively. Sizes can be imagined. The total throughput of the switching board, backplane, is 3.1 and 6.2 Terabits, respectively. Not 50, like the Voltaire Infiniband matrix, but also impressive. Each module accounts for up to 320 Gb / s. The chassis can have up to 768 gigabit Ethernet ports, or up to 128 10-gigabit ports.
Up to six hot-swappable power supplies can be installed in each chassis to implement N + N or N + 1 redundancy schemes. The operating system of the switch is Junos own development (as far as I know, FreeBSD was the main system). Switches provide work with 160 thousand MAC addresses and are able to organize up to 4096 VLAN subnets.
Oversan-Skalaxi uses the eight-module EX8208 chassis. Their main task is to receive external and inter-client traffic. That is, through the switches traffic flows from clients to the outside and vice versa. With the help of switches, traffic can be easily passed through a firewall on multiservice gateways (SRX3600 from Juniper) or organize a VLAN to isolate segments or individual clients. This is useful, for example, for organizing a quarantine VLAN in case of a DDoS attack on one of the clients - in this case it will not affect the others.
The two switches are connected by a 40-gigabit optical channel, so traffic, in principle, does not have to be “cooked” in only one switch; data is easy to drive back and forth, as appropriate. At the same speed, the switches are connected to the Voltaire Infiniband-matrix: on their shoulders lies the organization of interaction between clients and storage.
And finally, switches can be used to organize quality of service (QoS). Depending on client agreements, using QoS you can organize a transparent prioritization of traffic and mark the necessary traffic as a priority, achieving guaranteed bandwidth. This feature can be very useful, for example, in VoIP applications.
The story turned out to be quite short due to the inability to fully reveal the specifics of using these serious devices, but in this case too, we express the hope that it turned out to be interesting. The rest will be told by photos for us. The switches are photographed during the installation process.
General form. Only three modules are installed.
Close-up. On the left is a removable vertical fan module.
Modules close up. As in any powerful chassis, copper and optics are quietly adjacent.
Second switch closeup.
Places for power supplies. Below is the Juniper SRX3600 multi-service gateway.
Powerful load balancer from F5. His turn will come.