Juniper Networks Inc. claims to be “future-proofing” enterprises data centers with the launch of its latest QFX5700 Series networking switch.

It’s billed as the most flexible midsized switch of its kind available, with the ability to mix and match line cards with a range of interface options ranging from 10-gigabit Ethernet to 400G to support various use cases.

Juniper said today the QFX5700 Series will help to deliver on its vision of “experience-first networking,” an effort aimed at reimagining the data center with agile, intent-based operations.

In a blog post, Mike Bushong, vice president of data center product management at Juniper, said the QFX5700 Series switch will help usher in a new generation of intent-based, self-driving networks that leverage the company’s Apstra automation software.

“With Apstra, we’re helping customers go far beyond what other vendors call ‘automation’ — that is, automating a series of procedural steps to perform a given task faster,” Bushong said. “This may generate ‘speed’ in a narrow sense, but true business agility is built on the foundation of consistency and reliability.”

Customers can use Apstra to build operations frameworks in a repeatable way in multivendor environments that can identify when and where a task needs to be invoked, how it should be executed and whether that task has accomplished the desired intent. In other words, Apstra automates networks to help customers make the right decisions at the right time to achieve the best possible outcome, such as quality of experience for an application, security, reachability, compliance or another business-level imperative.

“Juniper is enabling an experience-driven operations model where humans can focus on what they want to happen instead of mastering the syntax needed to make it so,” Bushong said.

The Juniper QFX5700 Series Switch is a key component of that vision, he said, since it allows companies to bring intelligence to more places to address a much broader set of use cases. Its versatility is a crucial enabling factor, he said, with support for 10G, 25G, 40G,50G, 100G, 200G and even 400G line cards.

That flexibility means it can be installed pretty much anywhere, extending intent-based automation and rich telemetry to every part of the data center. The switch is said to be the first in the industry that’s based on Broadcom Inc.’s new Trident 4 programmable merchant silicon, capable of delivering 25.6 terabits per second of bidirectional bandwidth. The switch is powered by the latest version of Juniper’s network operating system, Junos Evolved.

Bushong explained that a true intent-based data center network is one that automatically translates business-level decisions into network configurations across complex and dynamic multivendor environments. To do this, companies must adopt an “operations mindset.” An intent-based network constantly models the state of the network, checks against that state, collects rich telemetry and proactively alerts human operators when an issue might be arising, he said.

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