[j-nsp] Junos feature licensing?

[Lewis, Charles]

Yes - Cisco has had separate licenses to buy for nonsense like
Interdomain routing, WAN protocols, etc for quite a while.  IOS has not
had any kind of feature activation requirement in years (it briefly
appeared with CiscoPro but was quietly removed shortly thereafter) -
it's the same code whether you bought the license or not.  

What this means - among other things - is that if I replace a router in
the field I turn the router on, it boots and continues to do what it
needs to do regardless of whether I've turned on netflow, etc.  On a
J-series box it means that I get a new router and then get the
appropriate license codes from JTAC to hopefully get the features I need
working.  What is *really* horrid is that I can't freely swap interfaces
between the modular chassis.  What if I want to take a 2-port FE out of
one J6300 and put it in another?  If I don't have appropriate licenses
I'm out of luck.  It was at best ill-conceived  selling a J2300 with two
T1 interfaces of which only one is working.

It also means that I have to keep track of license keys - sometimes as
many as three or four per router.  If Juniper wants to sell me hundreds
of routers asking me to track on hundreds and hundreds of keys
associated to serial numbers is a huge issue.  If I need to turn up a
new feature (say deploying route reflection on a couple of boxes) I
can't simply turn it on and buy the license (a la Cisco) but instead I
have to wait for a full procurement process to take place to buy license
keys.  Not good.

This whole situation comes off like Juniper is trying to nickel and dime
us. This is not a good move when you want to sell lots and lots of
devices and, frankly, this *will* be an impediment to their penetration
into the CPE/mid -sized router business.  Their apparent quest for a few
hundred bucks of license revenue in the short term will I have yet to
meet a fellow customer or even a Juniper employee who thinks this
approach is anything but a terrible idea.

CHL

-----Original Message-----
From: juniper-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net
[mailto:juniper-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Paul Schultz
Sent: Monday, July 18, 2005 12:21 PM
To: juniper-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: RE: [j-nsp] Junos feature licensing?




On Mon, 18 Jul 2005, Raymond Macharia wrote:

> I have already faced this huge road block when trying to recommend to 
> management that we switch to Juniper. I hope someone from Juniper is 
> feeling this rumblings

Let's stop pretending this is a new practice in the industry.  Cisco and

others for as long as I can remember have had additional licenses,
various 
software feature sets at various price tags, and loads of additional
line 
items on the quote that seem quite silly.  The only thing that's
happened 
here is Juniper is now following the same annoying software pricing
structure as their competitors.

Whether it's IPv6, SSH/Crypto, SNA, MPLS, "Inter-domain Routing License"

or whatever.. Let's not pretend that the main competitor here hasn't
been doing stuff like this for YEARS.

All you really have to do is say "I'm not paying for an IPv6 license..
If 
Cisco doesn't charge for one I'm buying Cisco instead." - that alone
will 
probably get you the v6 "license" for free or however many percentage 
points off the price tag to make up the difference.  Vendors are there
to 
be beat up, when they know they're going head to head with their arch
rivals they can do some pretty creative things to win the deal.

In my experience Juniper has been much better to deal with about these 
kinds of situations than others..  I can't speak much about say a one
time 
purchase of a single M7i, but if you're looking to spend a good amount
of 
money they'll break before you do on something as trivial as an IPv6 
license.

If they actually lose business as a result of it, it will go away.


My unlicensed $.02


Paul

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