Juniper ACX 500 and 5000 Models Announced

Today Juniper announced the expansion of their ACX range of Universal Access Routers with the addition of the ACX500 and ACX5000 variants. The ACX range boasts features allowing enterprises and service providers to delivery routing, MPLS and Metro-Ethernet services to the edge of their network in a compact form factor.

ACX500

The ACX500 model is hardened to be used either indoors or outdoors in rugged deployment scenarios and is equipped with a fanless, AC/DC powered chassis. Port configuration comes in a range of mixed copper or fibre 1Gbit ports. The overall throughput tops out at 6Gbit/sec making these perfect for remote wireless or cell tower deployments with a requirement to support L2/L3 MPLS functionality. The ACX 500 is also fitted with a GPS receiver to allow for superior clocking when deployed as part of a mobile backhaul network and to support location based mobile services.

ACX5000

The ACX5000 is a full featured, 1 or 2RU platform supporting a full range of MPLS, Metro-Ethernet and SDN features. The 5000 series comes in two model variants; the ACX5048 or ACX5096 each supporting 48 or 96 1Gbit (SFP) or 10Gbit (SFP+) ports with 6 or 8 QSFP ports supporting 40Gbit connectivity. Additionally, JunOS is run on each device within a KVM compliant hypervisor allowing for seamless OS upgrades (ISSU) by running two instances of JunOS and switching between them as part of the upgrade; similar to the QFX5100 line of switches. Other features include Virtual-Chassis and MC-LAG much like Juniper’s MX Metro-Ethernet routers.

The whole ACX family support integration with Juniper’s automation and management platform: Junos Space to unify the management of configuration and image deployment and to provide a single point of control for network automation.

All in all, the new additions to the ACX family is well placed to delivery enterprises and service providers even more options when building out next-generation networks supporting dynamic and virtualised network loads.