Juniper ships switch optimized for the cloud

Juniper Networks announced the availability of the EX8216 Ethernet switch, a 16-slot platform with a switch fabric capacity of 12.4 terabits.

The EX8216 joins the eight-slot EX8208 as Juniper’s modular, chassis-based LAN switch offerings. The EX8208 began shipping in the first quarter after a delay.

The EX8216 is optimized for high-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet data center and cloud computing environments, Juniper says. Juniper claims the switch has a per-slot capacity of 320Gbit/sec. and delivers up to 2 billion packets per second performance, features the company says will be required for 100G Ethernet in the future.

It will go up against Cisco’s Nexus 7000 and other high-end, data center-optimized switches and switching routers from Brocade, Extreme and Force10.

Even though the EX8216 is positioned by Juniper as a platform for cloud computing, the company is believed to be working on new switching architectures as part of its Stratus cloud computing project.Pricing for the EX8216 starts at $76,000.

Separately, Juniper confirmed that its recently introduced EX2500 top-of-rack 10G Ethernet data center switch is a licensed product that does not run its JUNOS software — a “chink” in the company’s end-to-end JUNOS consistency story, a company official acknowledges. He would not disclose the manufacturer of the switch but says Juniper chose to license the product for time-to-market purposes to fill a gap in its switching portfolio.