[j-nsp] Thanks for all the fish

[Chris Kawchuk]

Shall we start taking bets on what stays, and what goes? 

Here’s my List:

Stays:
PE/Edge Routing (MX/Trio) - Stays and continues development. Reasons stated already in this thread. It’s the Swiss army knife to solve $things-you-didn’t-even-know-you-needed-to-do for some future corner case, and is a market leader.
P/Core Routing (PTX/Express) - Stays, mainly as it’s also a good border router too. Lots of DC people using it for massive eBGP at scale, but don’t need the HQoS and Subscriber-y stuff that MX can do. 
DC Switching (QFX/Trident) - Stays - Nice product HPE can sell to enterprise customers. QFabric lives again in new forms (I'm looking at you VCF). Cheap and cheerful high speed switching doesn’t go out of style.

Questionable:
EX - Does it make sense to have EX and QFX? or roll them into one? Dunno. I like them when "i just need a switch there” which doesn’t sound like a Boeing 747 on takeoff. I’d like it to stay.
SRX - HPE can have a good security story now, but SRX needs an uplift versus what competitor’s NGFWs are up to these days (and no, Contrail isn’t the answer)

So — where does that leave ACX (Jericho2/2c+/Qumran)? My suspicions HPE says “What is this metro-E eVPN/VPWS MPLS aggregation stuff?". It doesn’t address any Enterprise solution for HPE that I can think of that couldn’t be covered by QFX/EX. It also is lagging behind Cisco NCS5700/NCS540 in both product maturity, and product breadth. i.e. If you want a nice small MPLS/SR capable pizza box that various form factors, power draw, faceplates, PFE speed, physical depth and size, etc... theres an NCS540 already built that does that. Contrast with… ACX7024 and the 7100. Basically 2 form factors from JNPR versus.. 12-15 different NCS540 and umpteen NCS5700 models and variants.

Again, ACX was never a competitor to the ASR920 which I know Mr Tinka was very fond of. And the NCS540 "is the new ASR920”. There’s some long roads ahead for JNPR to wrestle back some of that marketshare.

ACX also did a ‘reboot’ of the product line in the 7000-series when they went Jericho, versus ACX5000 which (correct me if I’m wrong) that was QFX/Trident/Trident+ based and earlier ACX series which were $no-idea-i-didnt-look-very-hard-at-them…. so its almost “a new product” which may not have a lot of customer nor market traction; thus easier to kill off. Yes — even though previous generations of ACX did exist and likely had some customers..somewhere…., I know of absolutely nobody that bought them nor used them in anger for a large Metro-E/MPLS/eVPN/SR network role.

I'm happy to be proven wrong on ACX; as I don’t like the idea of handing an entire market segment to a single vendor.

My $0.02

- CK.



> On 11 Jan 2024, at 9:15 am, Richard McGovern via juniper-nsp <juniper-nsp at puck.nether.net> wrote:
> 
> #1 jewel HPE (Aruba) is interested in is Juniper/MIST AI. MIST AI and ML is also being integrated into many other facets of Juniper, one being Apstra. See this in announcement - https://www.barrons.com/articles/cisco-stock-arista-juniper-hp-enterprise-acquisition-b94d6024 <https://www.barrons.com/articles/cisco-stock-arista-juniper-hp-enterprise-acquisition-b94d6024>