[j-nsp] The Switch is ON !!!

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 10:01:08AM -0500, Dorian Kim wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 09:41:01AM -0500, Joe Provo wrote:
> > It'll be interesting to hear juniper folks compare it to the crisco
> > nexus that was announced yesterday/
> 
> Bit of apples and oranges comparison between the two....

Obviously the proper comparison here is to the Cisco 3560G/E, the Foundry 
FESX, and the Extreme Summit x450 product lines. Interestingly, the EX 
series seems to be priced a fair bit below the comparable Cisco product 
across the board (typically Juniper seem to price a bit higher than the 
Cisco version, since their products are generally "better" and can command 
a higher price), and not much higher than the equivalent Foundry and 
Extreme products.

In theory these boxes may be targeted at Enterprises (well some at any 
rate, clearly there are a huge percentage who will never be able to grasp 
non-Cisco, or who depend on Cisco proprietary protocols), but to me it 
looks more like they're targeted at the datacenter (also going up against 
Foundry and Extreme) than the enterprise wiring closet. Features like MPLS 
(for doing VPN PE), and ISIS support should make this box very popular for 
colo and hosting environments doing switch-per-rack aggregation.

I could personally have done with support for a few more than 12k routes 
(no mention of IPv6/MPLS capacity, hopefully this won't impact IPv4 
services), and 4xXFP uplinks to compete with some of the newer and much 
cheaper Broadcom reference design boxes like the Dell 6224F and Force10 
S25P, but generally speaking this looks like a very interesting platform 
(and the bigger chassis even more so :P). Unfortunately 2 10GE uplinks for 
a 48-port 1GE box isn't quite good enough any more.

The only product Juniper seems to be missing in this lineup is a Nx10G 1U 
box, going up against the Cisco 3560E-12D 12-port X2 box (recently 
repriced to $20k list), Force10 S2410 (24-port XFP), Fujitsu XG2000 
(20-port XFP), and other similar products. I think if they made a 24-port 
or even a 12-port XFP 1U box that was stackable, MPLS capable, and perhaps 
supported a few more routes, it would sell like hotcakes.

</product review>

-- 
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)