A transcript of the audio you can play above follows.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s June 12th, 2018, and here’s what’s happening.

I had a briefing with Donyel Jones-Williams, Director of Product Marketing Management at Juniper Networks last week.

Juniper is one of the largest networking companies in the world with several divisions. This news was focused on Juniper’s service provider customers. Juniper made some forward looking announcements regarding upcoming hardware aimed at making the packet onslaught caused by IoT sensor data and 5G deployments easier to cope with.

All of these announcements center around a new MX Series 5G Universal Routing platform.

First up is the announcement of the MX10008 and MX10016 Universal Chassis. These join the existing PTX and QFX Universal Chassis products, meaning that the same chassis can run line cards from 3 different product lines, making it easier for customers to reposition the roles of these chassis without having to do a full rip and replace.

The MX10008 and MX10016 will be available during the second half of 2018.

Secondly, we have new silicon in the works. Penta chipsets will be 50% more power efficient when compared to Junos Trio chipsets. Penta silicon will also feature MACSEC and a native IP-Sec inline crypto engine, which Juniper claims is an industry first. Penta will also support flexible native Ethernet support (FlexE).

Juniper says that Penta-powered line cards for the familiar MX960, MX480 and MX240 chassis’ will be available in Q1 2019.

The final bit of news has to do with Control User-Plane Separation (CUPS) hardware acceleration. Juniper says that the MX Series 5G will support a standards-based 5G user-plane on the MX platform. This will allow for wireless and wireline services on the same box, but also allowing for third-party 5G control planes. What’s the big deal here? Scaling. Juniper is pushing the idea that hardware-accelerated CUPS matters, rather than doing CUPS virtualized. The bet is that large 5G deployments will require high performance to be successful, therefore, hardware acceleration will drive 5G scaling.

New CUPS support will be available in the first half of 2019.

Although these are forward looking announcements, Juniper states that they have demoed interoperability already, and plan to release some of that information in the coming months.

For More Information

Head over to http://newsroom.juniper.net/ and find additional details on this announcement.