Juniper Networks revealed the latest addition to its data center networking portfolio that shows the vendor is approaching network challenges differently from competitors like Cisco and Arista Networks.

The midsize QFX5700 series switch is the new member of Juniper’s QFX flagship product family. It combines ​​Juniper’s Junos OS Evolved network operating system with Broadcom’s programmable Trident 4 chipset, which can provide up to 25.6 Tb/s of bidirectional bandwidth. It stands as a five-rack unit chassis switch that supports line cards with port speeds up to 400-gigabit (400G) Ethernet.

Mike Bushong, VP of cloud-ready data center at Juniper, explained that the product allows customers to use connection speeds tailored to their current environment and can evolve to 400G deployments or next-generation data center networks under the same basic hardware.

The platform's software components tap into Juniper's acquisition last year of intent-based networking vendor Apstra. The vendor integrates switches with the Apstra platform to automatically deploy services and implement changes.

“In the operations space, this is where … what we're doing is very different than what Cisco is doing, which is very different from what Arista is doing,” Bushong told SDxCentral. He pointed out that “the industry for probably most of the last 15 years, frankly, has been roughly building the same thing,” which is focused on developing merchant silicon and VPN technologies.

However, “​​the next 10 years will be the era of divergence where we all fundamentally take our own paths forward,” Bushong added, referring to the different problems companies are trying to solve.

“We would argue that the problem to solve is actually reliability,” Bushong said, adding that Juniper aims to drive reliable operations across multi-domain data centers on-premises, in the cloud, or across multiple clouds. 

For the 400G transition journey, “we don't specify the blueprints in Juniper's specific language, those blueprints are abstracted,” which means that Apstra can support multi-vendor environments including Juniper, Cisco, Arista, Dell, and more, he said.

The Apstra acquisition helped Juniper strengthen its leadership in the 400G market. And in the most recent fiscal quarter, Juniper’s data center business was up 28% year over year, according to Bushong. Juniper also tripled its 400G data center customers last year while growing its port counts by about five-times over that same period, he added.

“What we're seeing now is that 400G is starting to push into actual deployment. That we're starting to see people scale their purchases and move beyond the labs and into production,”  Bushong said.