[j-nsp] EX Switch Question

[Pavel Lunin]

31.03.2013 18:18, Mark Tinka wrote:
> On Friday, January 11, 2013 01:41:47 PM Pavel Lunin wrote:
>
>> Looks like Juniper just did not much care metro ethernet.
>> BTW, it's sometimes said, that the reason is a lack of
>> such a market in North America (where I've even never
>> been to, thus can't judge whether this sentence is
>> correct :). Another reason (more serious, I would say)
>> is a strong Juniper's position in the MPLS battle, which
>> doesn't allow them to invest much into the plain
>> ethernet metro access technologies to not kill the goose
>> that lays the golden eggs (from the pure engineering
>> point of view there is also some logics in such an
>> approach).
> Well, Cisco must be seeing some market that Juniper aren't, 
> considering these are both American companies.

It was just the story as I heard it. I don't know really how right this
statement is (and for me it also seem a bit strange). Generally speaking
"American company" does not mean "make most money in the North America"
though I have no idea how different the ratios of NA/other are for Cisco
and Juniper these days.

I think more correctly this idea sounds like "Juniper don't believe they
can earn money on ME market for whatever reason". At least for me, not
playing the MetroE game seems to be a conscious decision, not an
oversight. Maybe just same story as the VoIP, where Cisco successfully
played for ages and Juniper gave up completely after a couple of silly
attempts (my special thanks to Juniper for deliverance from the SRX
"converged services" nightmare).

> When the MX80 was still codenamed Taz, and all we got to 
> test was a board with no chassis, I asked Juniper to rethink 
> their idea about a 1U solution for access in the Metro, 
> especially because Brocade had already pushed out the 
> CER/CES2000,
Well, as I involved into selling both Juniper and Brocade, from this
perspective I can say, Juniper's decision was just right :) I love
CES/CER but when it comes to real competition with MX5-80, there are
really few chances for Brocade. Small MX usually costs about the same in
a comparable configuration. A bit more expensive, but Brocade is by far
#3 in terms of MPLS features and all. Some exceptional niches exist,
also Brocade is going to launch a 4×10GE ports CER, but generally it's
really hard to position CER against MX/ASR and CES against Catalyst ME
or, say, Extreme X460.
> and Cisco were in the final stages of commissioning the ME3600X/3800X, at the time.
Well, I'd also really like to have a Juniper box competing against
Catalyst ME, but, again, I believe there might be (I don't say "there
is") some common sense in not even trying to play this game. I can
easily imagine sane reasons for which they decided to spend money and
time on ACX (PTX, QFabric, WiFi) instead of just trying to catch up
Cisco, Extreeme and others in the straightforward ME game.

> Epic fail on Juniper's part to think that networks will 
> still go for "too big" boxes for "small box" deployments. 
> The ERBU head promised that they were looking at a 1U MX80 
> box that would rival the Cisco and Brocade options in the 
> access, but I think they thought coming up with the MX5, 
> MX10 and MX40 were far better ideas :-\.
It's really interesting, that you say 2RU is too much for MX80. I never
heard such a claim from a customer. At least, it's never been a serious
problem. Much more often they ask whether it fits into a 60 cm deep rack
and how much power it eats. I think, the lack of this requirement comes
from completely different economics of real estate, access networks
structure and all. In many countries (where telecom markets are
emerging) access network is often an interconnection of places like
this: http://nag.ru/upload/images/20519/1877875733.jpeg In a hell I'd
put there something closely priced to MX5, be it 1 or 2 RU height :) So
people often come up using something extremely cheap in the PoPs (don't
even think "MPLS") and aggregate them in a location, where 1 or 2 RU
doesn't make much difference.