[j-nsp] Juniper EX

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 08:53:49PM -0600, David Ball wrote:
>   I sat through the EX presentation given by our account team a month
> or 2 ago.  To me, they look to have tremendous potential.  However,
> the lack of features currently supported for an SP environment are
> what's keeping it out of our network for now (never mind MPLS...they
> can't even do QinQ yet).  That said, the expectation was appropriately
> set from the get go, I think.  They were targeting the enterprise
> market initially, with plans over the next year of enabling features
> for SP networks.  The loose roadmap I saw for new features will likely
> put us into 2009 before we can take a serious look at them here.  Your
> requirements may differ.

It seems like most of the features for EX are roadmapped over 9.1 - 9.3, 
with many of the interesting features not coming until 9.3 (QinQ, IPv6, 
uRPF, GRE, etc). The MPLS features seem to be generically roadmapped 
without any specific version or timeline too (along with all of the 
high-availability stuff). I'm still waiting on a box to ship (so I can 
take one apart and destroy it for science :P), but I was playing with a 
4200 remotely on 9.0 and found a dozen or so bugs (ranging from bad to 
foundry) within the first couple hours of random poking.

Remember this is probably Juniper's biggest departure from their existing 
designs architecturally (at least for a box that is supposed to run 
similar JUNOS and do routing, not counting firewalls or session border 
crap), to say nothing of the completely different product focus. Not only 
is this completely different forwarding hw which is not related to 
anything Juniper has done in any other platform, but even the RE 
architecture is PowerPC based not i386. Expect growing pains for quite 
some time to come.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)