Juniper rolls out multi-product attack on Cisco

Juniper Networks rolled out an aggressive set of hardware, software, and services Monday morning, and while doing so it accused networking megacompetitor Cisco Systems of being yesterday's news. At a meeting with reporters and analysts Monday morning, Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson portrayed his company as the road to the future, …

[Nate Amsden]

big whoop?

reducing tiers, big surprise it makes things faster and cheaper. I've been running two tier networks for many years now, at least for data center environments never understood why anyone would want more than two tiers. Collapsing into a single tier can be useful for some applications, I'm looking at it for HPC stuff myself, but again nothing new here either.

Myself I'm a fan of Extreme networks they announced their "Direct connect" / "reduce tiers" strategy in April and were talking about it in the months prior. Really thought making it such an official thing was kind of stupid but now I see Juniper jumping on the same band wagon, must be a marketing thing.

Apparently the Direct connect approach was enough to win some sort of special mention at Interop recently (why that and not their 40Gig stuff I don't know..)

press release:

http://investor.extremenetworks.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=460934

Two tier network design:

http://www.extremenetworks.com/libraries/whitepapers/WPTwoTier_1082.pdf

direct attach design(1 tier):

http://www.extremenetworks.com/libraries/whitepapers/WPDirectAttach_1662.pdf

The Direct attach stuff just leverages MRJ21 technology using high density 96-port gigE blades on the 8900 series switch. I recall when I first saw foundry shipping MRJ21 technology several years ago, so the tech isn't new which made me question why make such a big deal out of it..

I wrote a blog entry last year about a L2/L3 protocol from Extreme called ESRP which as far as I know is unique in the industry in it's abilities, and quite awesome for a 2 tier network, unfortunately they don't promote the protocol at all.

http://www.techopsguys.com/2009/12/02/extremely-simple-redundancy-protocol/

so big whoop, everyone knows cisco is shit for performance and cost,

[Mike Powers]

Juniper was going to build our space-satellite routers

Too bad that didn't work out, I was looking forward to the program (not to mention that I'd have had a job until 2023!)

[Anonymous Coward]

One issue...

..they are not Cisco.

Cisco = Best

Microsoft = Best

Hp = Best

And don't try to tell anyone in charge / vested intrest (i.e. job presveration) anything else.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cisco Will Be So Scared

..about that puny competitor struggling with financial ruin. Barking like a scared little dog.

[Phil Koenig]

Juniper not so small

@jlocke: IIRC, Juniper is one of the very biggest players in some network device markets, ie "carrier networking" - the iron that the giant backbone networks use to route packets globally. They are traditionally either #1 or #2 in that market.

It's the smaller stuff that is newer to them. But they're not exactly tiny there, either. For example, they bought Netscreen, one of the top hardware FW/IDP ranges, which makes devices starting at ~$500.