Juniper Networks Unveils New Switch 

Juniper Networks today unveiled the QFX5100-AA, a new application acceleration switch, and the QFX-PFA, a new packet flow accelerator module, together providing a ground-breaking data center switch that consolidates compute resources and customizable logic into the network. Building on Juniper’s proven QFX product family, the QFX5100-AA and QFX-PFA in partnership with Maxeler Technologies’ customizable software logic will significantly accelerate business-critical applications in latency-sensitive computing environments. Ideal for financial services institutions, the switch and module will vastly improve the performance of applications that handle market data feeds, social media feeds, order execution routing and big data analytics, allowing financial firms to make decisions faster and take advantage of real-time market opportunities.

Today’s financial institutions need to analyze and process massive quantities of information instantly from various sources in order to make better trading decisions. Reducing the cost and complexity of their trading infrastructure so that it becomes faster and easier to manage is also a top priority. The compute-integrated networking approach will enable customers to distribute computing across their data center network infrastructure and achieve the ultra-high performance, low latency and predictability that is necessary in today’s financial services industry. This in turn will empower financial services firms to take advantage of emerging market opportunities, such as hyper-contextual trading, brought on by combining big-data analytics with increasingly powerful computing.

Juniper is committed to designing products that address its customers’ requirements for high-performance network infrastructure that can automate and scale as business demands. Financial institutions need to do real-time risk assessment, mine big data and process billions of new messages per second in order to be the first to act on a trade, which is why Juniper’s latest switch innovation will bring compute processing directly into the network.

Available in Q3 2015, the QFX5100-AA and QFX-PFA will enable financial services providers to streamline their network operations while empowering their customers to make split-second analysis based on significant amounts of data. Specific benefits will include:

• A holistic data center network architecture that builds on the Juniper Networks QFX5100 with a new 40G Ethernet switch that combines the Intel Xeon processor E3-1125C v2 with Broadcom switching silicon, and the QFX-PFA module based on the Altera multi-100G field-programmable gate array (FPGA).
• QFX5100-AA and QFX-PFA work with Maxeler Technologies’ dataflow programming environment for specific application programming that enables customers to develop and customize applications that best suit their requirements.
• Performance acceleration at the application level provided by using customizable logic to offload processing of compute-intensive, real-time, deterministic, latency sensitive applications.
• Data center automation, scale and compute power that accelerates packet flow processing and takes advantage of Juniper’s carrier grade operating system, Junos.
• Integration with Junos Space Network Director ensures automated and simple data center management from a single point of control.
• Supports Java as the programming language to simplify logic programmability.
• Better visibility and an application-centric view of the network through Juniper’s Cloud Analytics Engine that includes high frequency network monitoring and data analysis to improve overall performance.