Employing lessons from the big web-scale titans, Juniper Networks today unveiled a new universal chassis for operators to standardize all routing and switching deployments across data centers and the wide area network. And Juniper also announced the new Junos Node Slicing, allowing routers to be used for different routing functions.

“The best lesson learned from web-scale companies is to start to standardize operations; to have hardware platforms that look the same across different deployments,” said Donyel Jones-Williams, director of product marketing at Juniper.

The universal chassis uses the same software and hardware from Juniper's router lines, but it offers better utilization of hardware by decoupling line cards from the physical chassis. And it can be deployed across data centers, in core networks, or at the network edge.

The universal chassis supports the new PTX10008, PTX10016, QFX10008, QFX10016, and ultimately MX series line cards.

“The universal chassis can deploy across multiple use cases,” said Jones-Williams. “You slide in the line card for the level of sophistication you need.”

Juniper also announced its Junos Node Slicing, which enables operators to run multiple services or instances on the same router, each of which has a separate administrative domain.

In the world of 5G, operators are talking about network slicing. They’re developing technology to “slice” out parts of the mobile network for specific use cases or specific users. Juniper chose the term Junos Node Slicing on purpose to relate it to the network slicing concept.

“In our conversations with mobile operators looking at 5G, network slicing is becoming a requirement,” said Jones-Williams. “We can now actually do that in the router itself and slice the router independently. The use of our routers is going to be improved.”

In the past a single operating system ran on a single router. But with node slicing, customers can use the same router, while dedicating different slices for residential routing and business services routing. The code for residential could, for example, be updated independently from the code for business services.

“Because things like 5G and IoT are putting different operational strains on networks, we need to be able to manipulate the network infrastructure to mirror those operational difficulties,” said Jones-Williams.

With Junos Node Slicing a service provider could get better use of its hardware because it doesn’t have to procure a router for one business unit that might be doing business services and procure another router for the wireless group in same central office.

Jones-Williams said Junos Node Slicing and the universal chassis are being announced independently of each other. But they can also work hand-in-hand.