EX4600 System Overview

Benefits of the EX4600 Switch

Compact solution—The EX4600 switch supports up to 72 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports in a 1 rack unit (1 U) chassis.

Intelligent buffer management—EX4600 switches have a total of 12 MB shared buffers. While 25 percent of the total buffer space is dedicated, the rest is shared among all ports and is user configurable. The intelligent buffer mechanism in the EX4600 effectively absorbs traffic bursts while providing deterministic performance, significantly increasing performance over static allocation.

Energy efficiency—The 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports consume less than five watts, thereby offering a low power solution for top-of-rack, end-of-row, and distribution deployments.

EX4600 Hardware

The EX4600 switch is a compact 1 U model that provides wire-speed packet performance, very low latency, and a rich set of Layer 2 and Layer 3 features. In addition to a high-throughput Packet Forwarding Engine, the performance of the control plane running on the EX4600 model is enhanced by the 1.5-GHz dual-core Intel CPU with 32 GB of solid-state drive (SSD) storage.

The port panel of the EX4600 features 24 fixed small form-factor pluggable (SFP) or SFP+ access ports and 4 fixed quad SFP+ (QSFP+) high-speed uplinks.

Figure 1: EX4600 Port Panel with Expansion Bays

In addition, the switch has two module bays where you can install optional expansion modules. The EX4600 switch supports two expansion modules to increase port density:

• QFX-EM-4Q–Adds four additional QSFP+ ports to the chassis. When fully populated with QFX-EM-4Q expansion modules, the EX4600 is equivalent to one with 72 interfaces (24 + 16 + 16 + 16). See Figure 2.

  Figure 2: QFX-EM-4Q Expansion Module

• EX4600-EM-8F–Adds a total of eight additional SFP+ ports to the chassis. When fully populated with EX4600-EM-8F expansion modules, the EX4600 is equivalent to one with 56 interfaces (24 + 16 + 8 + 8). See Figure 3.

  Figure 3: EX4600-EM-8F Expansion Module

The EX4600 switch can be used as:

• A standalone switch.

• A primary, backup, or linecard member in a Virtual Chassis with EX4600 switches or EX4300 switches. When in a mixed Virtual Chassis consisting of EX4600 switches and EX4300 switches, the EX4600 switches can be the primary, backup, or in the linecard role, while the EX4300 switches must be in the linecard role. An EX4600 Virtual Chassis enables you to interconnect up to 10 switches into one logical device and manage the device as a single chassis. An EX4600 Virtual Chassis is cabled in a ring topology.

  In a mixed Virtual Chassis of EX4600 and EX4300 switches, the Junos OS release dictates whether the EX4600 is best used in the primary role. For Junos OS releases between 13.2X50-D10 and 14.1X53-D25, use the use the EX4300 as a primary and backup RE in the Virtual Chassis. For Junos OS Release 14.1X53-D25 and later, the EX4600 is fully supported as the primary in a mixed Virtual Chassis of EX4600 and EX4300.

System Software

EX Series switches run the Junos operating system (OS), which provides Layer 2 and Layer 3 switching, routing, and security services. An EX4600 switch ships with Junos OS installed on it. The same Junos OS code base that runs on EX4600 switches also runs on all Juniper Networks QFX Series devices, M Series, MX Series, and T Series routers.

You manage the switch by using the Junos OS CL), which is accessible through the console and out-of-band management ports on the switch.

All models of the EX4600 run on Junos OS Release 13.2X51-D25 or later.