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EX8200 ETHERNET
LINE CARDS
DATASHEET
Product Overview
Juniper Networks EX8200 Ethernet
line cards offer a variety of interfaces
for supporting high-density 100 Mbps,
Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE)
deployments. Working with the
Juniper Networks EX8208 eight-slot
and EX8216 16-slot modular Ethernet
switch chassis, the EX8200 Ethernet
line cards offer flexible, high-density
interfaces for high-performance data
center and campus aggregation and
core environments.
Product Description
The Juniper Networks® EX8200 line of Ethernet switches offer powerful, modular
platforms that deliver the performance, scalability, and carrier-class reliability required for
today’s high-density enterprise data center access and core and campus aggregation and
core environments, as well as high-performance service provider interconnects.
EX8200 Ethernet line cards are specifically designed to optimize enterprise applications.
Each EX8200 Ethernet line card includes either two or four on-board Packet Forwarding
Engines—the EX-PFE2—that are equipped with two purpose-built, application-specific
integrated circuits (ASICs), one to perform wire-speed packet processing at line rates, and
another to perform internal deep packet queuing and buffering while providing a highspeed interface to the chassis switch fabric. In addition, each line card contains a local
processor which provides scalable local control and status processing.
Eight versions of the EX8200 Ethernet line cards are available, each of which supports
a consistent set of features and capabilities: the EX8200-48T, the EX8200-48F, the
EX8200-8XS, the EX8200-40XS, the EX8200-48TL, the EX8200-48PL, the EX82002XS-40T and the EX8200-2XS-40P. Four of these cards are available in Extra Scale (ES)
configurations—the EX8200-48T-ES, the EX8200-48F-ES, the EX8200-8XS-ES and
the EX8200-40XS-ES—which are optimized for large-scale deployments such as large
campuses, global data centers, or cloud-based applications.
EX8200-48T: The EX8200-48T Ethernet line card offers wire-rate 48
10/100/1000BASE-T ports with RJ-45 copper connectors. Designed for data center endof-row server access, or campus applications where high densities, high performance, and
high availability over copper links of up to 100 m are required, the EX8200-48T enables up
to 384 line-rate ports in a single EX8208 chassis, or 768 ports in an EX8216 chassis.
EX8200-48F: The EX8200-48F is a 48-port wire-rate 100BASE-FX/1000BASE-X line
card with modular small form-factor pluggable transceiver (SFP) interfaces for supporting
a wide range of 100 Mbps or Gigabit Ethernet optical connections over multimode fiber,
single-mode fiber, or copper cabling. Designed for high-performance enterprise and
service provider distribution applications, the EX8200-48F also enables up to 384 linerate ports in an EX8208 chassis, and 768 ports in an EX8216 chassis.
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EX8200-8XS: The EX8200-8XS is an eight-port 10GBASE-X line
card with compact, modular SFP+ fiber optic interfaces, enabling
up to 64 line-rate 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports in an EX8208 chassis
and 128 ports in an EX8216 chassis. The EX8200-8XS is ideal
for enterprise applications such as campus or data center uplink
aggregation, core and backbone interconnects, and for service
provider deployments requiring high-density, wire-speed 10-Gigabit
Ethernet interconnects in metro area networks, Internet exchange
points, and points of presence (POPs). The 10-Gigabit Ethernet
port densities afforded by the EX8200-8XS line cards also enable
EX8200 switches to consolidate aggregation and core layers in
the data center, simplifying the network architecture and reducing
power, space, and cooling requirements while lowering total cost of
ownership (TCO).
Oversubscribed Server and User Access
The EX8200 includes five oversubscribed line cards that provide costeective GbE and 10GbE server access for high-density data centers.
EX8200-40XS: The EX8200-40XS is a 40-port oversubscribed
10GbE solution for data center end-of-row and middle-of-row
server access, as well as for data center blade switch and topof-rack or campus uplink aggregation deployments. Optimized
for data center networks migrating from GbE to 10GbE interfaces
where simultaneous line-rate performance is not required on all
ports, the EX8200-40XS supports a wide range of both SFP (GbE)
and SFP+ (10GbE) modular optical interfaces for connecting over
multimode fiber, single mode fiber, and copper cabling.
The 40 SFP/SFP+ ports on the EX8200-40XS are divided into
eight independent groups of five ports each. Because port
groups are independent of one another, each group can have its
own oversubscription ratio, providing customers with maximum
deployment flexibility. Each group dedicates 10 gigabits per
second (Gbps) of switching bandwidth to be dynamically
shared among the ports; queues are allocated within a 1 MB
oversubscription buffer based on the number of active ports in a
group and the types of interfaces installed. Users simply connect
the cables and the EX8200-40XS automatically provisions each
port group accordingly. No manual configuration is required.
The EX8200-40XS line card can satisfy either 10GbE or GbE
applications within each port group independently, providing the
perfect migration vehicle for customers transitioning to higher
speed connectivity.
EX8200-48TL: The EX8200-48TL offers 48 oversubscribed (2.4:1)
10/100/1000BASE-T RJ-45 ports to provide cost-effective GbE
server access in high-density data center end-of-row applications.
The EX8200-48TL also supports server access, converged
access, and aggregation/core deployments, where it can be used
to connect management stations, analyzers, sniffers, firewalls,
intrusion detection and prevention/intrusion detection service (IDP/
IDS) devices, server load balancers, and other devices.
The EX8200-48TL, which delivers up to 24 Gbps and 36 million
packets per second (pps) performance, supports MACSec
functionality on all GbE ports in hardware and features eight
quality-of-service (QoS) queues per port. Configured exclusively
with EX8200-48TL line cards, a single EX8208 chassis can
support up to 384 GbE ports while a single EX8216 chassis can
support up to 768 GbE ports.
EX8200-48PL: The EX8200-48PL is physically identical to
the -48TL and includes support for the IEEE 802.3af Power over
Ethernet (PoE) standard. It delivers up to 15.4 watts of Class 3 PoE
on all 48 ports to power networked devices such as telephones,
video cameras, and wireless LAN (WLAN) access points, providing
an EX8200-based user access or converged access/core solution.
In addition, the first 12 ports are capable of supporting the IEEE
802.3at PoE+ standard, which delivers up to 30 watts per port to
power devices that require more than the 15.4 watts provided by
Class 3 PoE.
EX8200-2XS-40T: The EX8200-2XS-40T is a combination card
offering 40 oversubscribed (2.5:1) 10/100/1000BASE-T RJ-45
ports, four line-rate 100/1000BASE-SX SFP ports, and two line-rate
10GbE SFP+ ports for uplink connectivity. The EX8200-2XS-40T
is ideal for providing GbE/10GbE uplink capacity by combining
the fiber ports into a link aggregation group (LAG); meanwhile,
the remaining slots in the EX8200 chassis can be populated with
EX8200-48TL line cards to provide access connectivity. The two
SFP+ 10GbE uplink ports can also be used as Virtual Chassis ports
when the EX8200 is deployed in a Virtual Chassis configuration.
The EX8200-2XS-40T, which delivers up to 24 Gbps performance
on the GbE ports and up to 20 Gbps performance on the 10GbE
ports, supports MACSec functionality on all GbE ports in hardware.
Configured exclusively with EX8200-2XS-40T line cards, a single
EX8208 chassis can support up to 352 GbE ports and 16 10GbE
ports, while a single EX8216 chassis can support up to 704 GbE
ports and 32 10GbE ports. Each port features eight QoS queues
and 21 MB (GbE) and 512 MB (10GbE) buffers.
EX8200-2XS-40P: The EX8200-2XS-40P is physically identical
to the -40T and includes support for the IEEE 802.3af PoE
standard, which delivers up to 15.4 watts of Class 3 PoE on all
40 ports to power networked devices such as telephones, video
cameras, and wireless LAN (WLAN) access points. The first 12
ports are also capable of supporting the IEEE 802.3at PoE+
standard, which delivers up to 30 watts per port to power devices
that require more than the 15.4 watts provided by Class 3 PoE.
Extra Scale Line Cards
The EX8200-48T-ES, EX8200-48F-ES, EX8200-8XS-ES and
EX8200-40XS-ES extra-scale line cards are optimized for largescale deployments such as large campuses, global data centers,
cloud-based applications, and internet peering environments. The
ES cards provide twice the Forwarding Information Base (FIB)
table capacity of the non ES cards, enabling them to support
multiple copies of complete internet routing tables. Designed for
internet-facing environments, the ES cards are otherwise identical
to the non-ES versions and are available in both copper (EX820048T-ES) and fiber (EX8200-8XS-ES, EX8200-48F-ES and
EX8200-40XS-ES) versions.
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Features and Benefits
The EX8200 PFE2 complex is comprised of two ASICs: the packet
processor and the switch fabric interface. The hardware pipeline
on the packet processor ASIC supports approximately 960 Mpps
of Layer 2 and Layer 3 IPv4 and IPv6 traffic in the EX8208, and
more than 1900 Mpps in the EX8216. Wire-speed performance
is maintained regardless of packet size, from 64- to 9216-byte
jumbo frames across both L2 and L3 interfaces. Firewall (access
control list) filtering, marking, and rate limiting also occur at wire
rate, with up to 64,000 entries across L2-L4 packet headers that
can be applied per port, per VLAN, and per routed interface.
The packet processor ASIC also supports generic routing
encapsulation (GRE) tunneling and three-label MPLS in hardware
at line rate . Additional packet processor ASIC capabilities include
multiple queues for CPU-bound control traffic to protect the
Routing Engine from denial of service (DoS) attacks, and support
for up to seven mirrored analyzer sessions directed to individual
ports, VLANs, or tunneled interfaces.
The switch fabric interface ASIC of the EX-PFE2 manages the
large ingress and egress buffers that provide congestion avoidance
and traffic prioritization. On ingress, each switch fabric interface
queues packets based on destination using dedicated high- and
low-priority buffers for each wire-speed, 10-Gigabit Ethernet
egress port, or each group of 12 Gigabit Ethernet ports in the
system. These weighted random early detection (WRED) virtual
output queues—up to 8,192 in an EX8216 chassis—prevent “headof-line blocking” among ports on the same line card, ensuring
complete independence of traffic flows among all 10-Gigabit
Ethernet ports in the system.
The switch fabric interface also manages the transfer of data
across the distributed, single-tier crossbar switch fabric. Data is
evenly distributed across the fabric to balance traffic load and
ensure graceful degradation of performance in the event of a nonredundant switch fabric failure. Multicast traffic is also balanced
across the system using the same line-rate, binary-tree replication
process as the Juniper Networks T Series Core Routers and the
Juniper Networks MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers, minimizing
fabric congestion while reducing latency.
On egress, the switch fabric interface provides eight dedicated
queues per port, mapped according to class of service (CoS) or
DiffServ code point (DSCP) values. A WRED scheduler is used for
congestion avoidance within each queue, while administratorconfigured strict and weighted round-robin priority options are
available between queues on a single port. Multicast traffic is
managed independent of unicast traffic.
Total buffer size is 512 MB on each EX8200-8XS 10-Gigabit
Ethernet port or each EX8200-40XS port group, and 42 MB
on each EX8200-48T and EX8200-48F Gigabit Ethernet port,
providing 50-100 ms of bandwidth delay buffering. These deep
buffers and ingress and egress queuing mechanisms are critical
to managing mission-critical data, handling bursty traffic,
and limiting TCP/IP retries at the application level to free up
bandwidth, reduce latency and allow a higher quantity of both
unicast and multicast application flows across the network.
All packets pass through the entire EX-PFE2 ingress pipeline, the
switch fabric, and the EX-PFE2 egress pipeline. This consistency
of packet processing ensures that the EX-PFE2 is capable of
delivering port-to-port latencies of under 10 µs, regardless of
ingress or egress port location.
Up to 255 link aggregation groups (LAGs) are supported, ensuring
that the large number of high-density Gigabit Ethernet LAGs found
in campus and data center core and aggregation deployments can
be accommodated. Up to 12 ports may be bundled into a single
LAG, allowing 120 Gbps logical interfaces to be created using a full
L2-L4 hash algorithm for optimal load balancing. Ports in a LAG
may be distributed across line cards within an EX8200 switch for
an added level of resiliency. Automatic detection, recovery, and
redistribution of LAG traffic in the event of a port, link, or line card
failure is supported for highly reliable connections.
Each line card contains a local CPU that is connected to the
chassis’ redundant Routing Engines over dedicated internal
gigabit control-plane links. This CPU manages the local line card
components, distributes forwarding table and other control plane
data from the Routing Engine to the local EX-PFE2 ASICs, and
returns line card status and CPU-directed control plane packets
to the Routing Engine. A second processor resident on each line
card aggregates flow-based statistics and analyzes sampled
packets without impacting control plane performance. Finally,
hot insertion and removal of all line cards is supported for online
maintenance and support.
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