Help us improve your experience.

Let us know what you think.

Do you have time for a two-minute survey?

 
 

Recommendations

The ACX7024 is a reliable choice as a CSR, offering an enhanced feature-set and improved performance compared to previous ACX platforms in most situations. It is specifically designed for the CSR role, catering to the scale, bandwidth, and performance requirements associated with this function.

As compared to the ACX7100-48L, the ACX7024 demonstrates identical feature-set and comparable performance for the CSR role and scale. Compared to previous generation ACX5448/ACX710, we observed overall convergence improvements across all services in the featured design.

Segment Routing is a suggested underlay architecture for enabling seamless MPLS stitching with BGP-LU across multiple IGP and inter-AS domains. This setup can be further improved by incorporating Seamless-SR and BGP-CT once they are fully supported. By utilizing TI-LFA and ECMP mechanisms, we can achieve quick failover and resilience. However, currently ACX7000 series does not support simultaneous ECMP and Fast Reroute (FRR) functionalities.

The ACX7024 supports deterministic and effective QoS, performing within expectations.

Layer 3 (DSCP), MPLS (EXP), and Layer 2 (802.1p) traffic, whether single-tagged or dual-tagged, were accurately classified based on their respective codepoints. The priority hierarchies were properly maintained within the guaranteed and excess regions, as defined by the transmit rate. It is important to note that only the low priority queue supports weighted fair queuing (WFQ), which is necessary for weighted distribution in the excess region. The strict-high priority queue, as is typical, does not have an excess region and needs to be shaped to avoid starving the low priority queues. The CoS model implemented in this scenario ensured that the low priority queues always received the committed information rates (CIR) as configured, using transmit-rate percentages.

When a port is shaped, the CoS scheduling parameters are appropriately adjusted to match the new port speed. Codepoint preservation was successfully maintained during all tested VLAN manipulation sequences, as expected. In terms of latency performance, the ACX7024 demonstrated comparable results to the ACX7100-48L. The average single-DUT latency was slightly better, with around 4-5µs for the ACX7024 compared to 5-8µs for the ACX7100. However, the minimum achieved latency of ACX7100 was 3.5µs and minimum latency observed for ACX7024 was 4.6µs.

As compared to the previously validated ACX5448/ACX710 reference network design, we observed differences in some CoS behaviors, which are worth understanding when planning migration to ACX7000 series.

  • The ACX7000 series supports significantly more VLAN manipulation operations compared to earlier ACX platforms, to bring relative parity with MX platforms.
  • 802.1p bits are preserved without incurring a default rewrite. ACX5448/ACX710 perform a default rewrite.
  • The ACX7000 series does not include simultaneous use of transmit-rate and shaping-rate for a queue. When only shaping-rate is utilized, the behavior is such that the strict-high queue deducts the configured rate from the total port speed, and the remaining bandwidth is allocated to the other queues based on their configured percentages. For example, if a 10G port has a 40% shaping-rate queue (SH), it deducts 4G from the total port speed. The remaining 6G is allocated to the other queues. For instance, a low priority queue with a 50% transmit-rate receives 3G.
  • The ACX7000 series doesn’t support routing-instance classification or rewrite functionalities.
  • The ACX7000 series doesn’t support the ability to lock the buffer using temporal or exact configuration.

For further details, contact your Juniper Networks representative for the full test report.

Although this JVD primarily focuses on the convergence of 5G xHaul infrastructure, the technologies and practical solutions discussed can serve as building blocks for developing various network architectures. These concepts can be leveraged to support multidimensional network designs and enable further advancements in network infrastructure.