Juniper spent two years and hundreds of millions of dollars developing the EX line of enterprise switches which it launched Tuesday amid great fanfare. The launch comes just a day after Cisco's release of its big Nexus switch aimed at giving Cisco ownership of the data center. The Cisco rival chose to develop the switch itself, instead of acquiring an enterprise switch vendor, to ensure the products share a common heritage with the company's routers and NetScreen firewall and VPN products, reports Network World's Jim Duffy. When Juniper first came onto the scene in 1997, it took it a few short years to grab a third of Cisco's shares in the carrier routing market. How long will it take for Juniper to eat into Cisco's bread-and-butter enterprise switching market?  

Juniper's EX switches are smaller and cost a third of competitors'  switches, according to Juniper. EX supports Juniper's version of NAC, called Unified Access Control (UAC), which enables the switches to enforce access policies rather than rely on third-party firewalls, VPN gateways or switches, reports Tim Greene in his story for Network World. The switches are offered in three sizes: The 3200 switches are fixed-configuration 24- or 48-port boxes with 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet ports supporting power over Ethernet (PoE); the 4200 series is built on modular chassis meant for data centers and large corporate offices; and the 8200 series are core switches for 10G Ethernet backbones that come in two models.

The Juniper announcement comes a week after it emerged that Juniper plans to pull out of the load-balancing application acceleration market.

Speculation that Juniper was to announce EX today first came to light early December. Read what Cisco Subnet readers had to say back then.

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