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DESIGN GUIDE - Data Center LAN Connectivity Design Guide
Taking full advantage of Virtual Chassis technology, a scalable top-of-rack deployment takes the minimum
amount of space with small form-factor switches that scale with high-density wire-speed ports as needed,
lowering heating and cooling costs while conserving space. Virtual Chassis technology enables up to 10 units to
interoperate and be managed as a single device, dramatically simplifying configuration and management while
reducing operational costs and simplifying cabling. By configuring 10 top-of-rack switches as a single virtual
chassis, fewer uplinks are necessary which further lowers cost, cable complexity and troubleshooting. Most
importantly, the servers attached to the top-of-rack switches are all interconnected by a single, high-bandwidth
low-latency switch and do not need to rely on traffic going to an aggregation switch for server-to-server
communications—valuable for improving performance in an SOA environment.
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VC #1
VC #2
Uplinks for VC #1
Uplinks for VC #2
Figure 11: Top-of-rack deployment using virtual chassis technology
b.End-of-Row Deployments
Configurations requiring end of row deployments can also take advantage of Virtual Chassis technology with
a small form factor that scales with high-density wire-speed ports as needed, lowering heating and cooling
costs while conserving space. Dramatically simplifying operations and configuration, Virtual Chassis technology
enables a set of up to 10 units to be managed as one device and lowers operations expense.
EX4200 line
Figure 12: End-of-row deployment using virtual chassis technology
5.Reducing CAPEX and OPEX
At one-eighth the footprint and less than one third the cost of the most commonly purchased chassis-based
switch offering 480 1000BASE-T GbE ports and twenty 10 GbE wire-speed ports, the EX4200 switches with
Virtual Chassis technology represents the new generation of GbE access switching.
The Juniper EX4200 Series switches include standard features that require costly add-ons in competitive
solutions. For example, the EX4200 Series includes Layer 3 features in the base software license, offers built-in
10 GbE uplink capability, delivers partial or full PoE, provides built-in redundant power supplies and fans, and
more in a single cost-optimized platform. OPEX savings include the unified JUNOS Software feature set and
remote mirroring capability for full troubleshooting, maintenance, upgrades and debugging from a central NOC.
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