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

[Dan Farrell]

I wonder if that's because they're not trying to make an 'everything'
package on their first stab in the marketplace.

It sounds like they submitted a decent first attempt at the switching
space and will wait to see what shakes out, and what people will say (as
per your suggestion) what works and doesn't work for them. I'm not
saying XFP won't enter the product line, but perhaps it will only be in
some of the later versions of their products and not others.

I think it wouldn't be the wisest move for them to have the
"feature-killer" switch on their first attempt (with things like 1mil
routes, full MPLS/VPLS, metro features, XFP, etc.), but instead see
where the market takes what appears to be a decent (if not imperfect)
product. I guess that's why the POE feature set kind of confused me- it
strikes me as a significant feature to add with limited use in a
datacenter.

Personally, I'm excited. Already I view the low-end 3200 in many spaces
of our network, as both switch and router (despite the 12k limitation- I
don't think we have more than 1k OSPF routes right now anyway.)

And the best part is that (given its performance) I can now suggest to
management that we can go with one vendor for most of the network-
before this we were resigned with Juniper for routing, Cisco (or someone
else) for switching- now we can look at Juniper throughout the path. Wow
does that make life easier for me.


danno

-----Original Message-----
From: juniper-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net
[mailto:juniper-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Richard A
Steenbergen
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 5:10 PM
To: bill fumerola
Cc: Juniper-NSP Mailing list
Subject: Re: [j-nsp] The Switch is ON !!!

On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 12:09:07PM -0800, bill fumerola wrote:
> so i agree with everything RAS said. per usual. :)

Woo. :)

BTW, I'd like to point out one additional item which is publicly
available 
information but which generally seems to have been overlooked so far. If

you take a close look at the "coming not-very-soon" EX8200 on page 6:

http://www.juniper.net/solutions/literature/brochures/150057.pdf

You'll notice 8 distinct 10G ports per blade. At first glance one might
be 
tempted to believe they are XFP ports, but those are SFP+ ports. Why is 
this a problem? Because SFP+ achieve their density not by significantly 
reducing power draw, but by eliminating the higher end power classes
which 
are necessary to drive medium and long reach optics (40km ER, 80km ZR,
any 
DWDM tuned optics, etc). There is a thread on exactly why this sucks so 
bad over on cisco-nsp, but the bottom line is that if you have an SFP+ 
product you will NEVER be able to do long reach optics (let alone at the

very reasonable prices or 40-channel DWDM frequencies available in 
commodity XFP today).

I'm personally baffled by Juniper's decision here, it's not like they
even 
need SFP+ to achieve the density required. On the Cisco Nexus 32-port
10G 
SFP+ blade (which also does FC), or the 48-port 10G SFP+ 1U Arastra box,

there is a legitmate excuse for using SFP+ at the expense of long reach 
optics, but on the Juniper 8-port full-sized blade there is absolutely
no 
reason Juniper should not be using XFP here.

I would encourage anyone who is interested in this product and who might

ever want to use long-reach optics in it to talk to their account team 
about XFP instead of SFP+ blades NOW before this horribly bad idea 
progresses any further.

-- 
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)
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