Juniper is often not one to discuss with the media its thoughts on the competition when the competition - i.e. Cisco - makes a big product announcement. However, this week, Juniper CTO 
and founder Pradeep Sindhu told Network World's Jim Duffy exactly what he thought of Cisco's new ASR 1000 router, namely how wrong Cisco is to force its customers to learn a new operating system with each new product (ASR 1000 sports the new IOS-XE, and the Cisco Nexus data center switch has the new NX-OS).
In a Q&A with Duffy, Sindhu said: "[A single operating system] is a need that our customers are telling us they have. They do not like the fact that they have to read manuals this thick to figure out what release of the operating system works with which particular product and products, and what the combination of limitations are that are imposed by particular subsets of the products that they are using. That becomes very complicated. Much of this is reflected in operational cost increasing for the customer."
He said this is in sharp contrast to Juniper's strategy of having a single OS and a single architecture. "We try to have a consistent single operating system and a single unified architecture for two reasons: internally [at Juniper], it is tremendously efficient because we get to solve difficult problems once rather than solving them over and over again; from a customer’s standpoint products appear to be consistent and are consistent, so they are a lot easier to use."
Makes sense to me. But why is it that Cisco is coming out with a new OS with each new significant product?
See also: Cisco launches ASR 1000 router: What's Juniper's next move?
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If Cisco has too many OS's, Juniper has to few
As a consequence of unifying the OS, Juniper has a very short software and product life-cycle. Everytime they detect an issue in one platform, they need to patch and fix them all. Three OS versions per year is just too much. If you can't upgrade your gear frquently, then you can easily stay behind several versions of code in a short period of time. I'd rather deal with several versions of OS, and deal with consistency at a programming level.
Not as bad as it sounds
People try to paint it worse than it is with Cisco IOS. I've been at this 11 years, in almost a 100% cisco environment, and it's really not a big deal to "figure out what release of the operating system works with which particular product". Keep in mind that those who left Cisco to go to Juniper, "made the mess" they now reference back at Cisco. Cisco has made huge progress in cleaning up what Juniper has sometimes called the "train wreck". I've got to believe that if Cisco were so bad, or even if Juniper was so great, that Cisco wouldn't consistently hold over 75% of the switch market and 86% of the enterprise router market. That says a lot to me. Consider that Juniper trash talks ios as "monolithic" but when cisco makes steps forward with IOS, Juniper comes back to bag on that too. Gotta love playing both sides of everything.
does it makes scence?
juniper wants to make a single operating system " but they keep the certifications different for each product, does it make sence?
Leave it to Market
Its not gud to blame or abuse others.. leave it to market.. We all have learnt Networking the Cisco way. So we shud be a little comfortable with variety of IOS .. Although they are improving on that front too..
Let me just say that anyone who has worked on both Juniper and C
Let me just say that anyone who has worked on both Juniper and Cisco CLI or has experienced a non-bandwidth consuming denial-of-service attack will never look back at Cisco. Been there, done that, no thanks Cisco.
Anti-establishment crowd
Your comment about "working on both, and preferring J" reminds me of an observation I've made over the years. There is a certain segment of our society, that will nearly always prefer whatever is NOT "the establishment". The masses are fine with Windows, but a few love Mac (or linux). The vast majority use and like Cisco, but a few love Juniper. Juniper has been good for pushing Cisco to innovate and push the envelope. J's failure to seriously penetrate the enterprise markets is not good for them as a company and causes me to wonder if they can ever become more than they are today. And Cisco keeps pushing back on the SP market and gaining traction. J is still very much a David to the C Goliath. It'll be curious to watch over the next 10 years.
RE: Anti-establishment crowd
You're confused. We're not talking about preference but rather business survival in a hostile environment. As a former Cisco customer, we came to realize that Cisco equipment was architected with the mindset of the early 1990's when the network was based on trust and that this legacy mindset and architecture are inadequate for today's network with existing and future threats. We had to learn the hard way when our company's internet presence was impacted due to Cisco equipment's vulnerability and sensitivity to certain traffic that causes loss of in-band and out-of-band management access, pegged CPU utilization and routing protocol failure affecting packet forwarding and connectivity. After understanding the traffic, the equipment architectural issues and not finding anything capable in Cisco's arsenal up to the 6500/7600 we set out to look at other vendors. Our research discovered a company we've heard of, Juniper, but didn't know too much about prior and that their boxes when subjected to the same traffic are not only immune out of the box but also capable of filtering the traffic to protect downstream Cisco devices that Cisco can't touch. Apparently, our service provider's NOC engineers recommend the same vendor but had to do it off the record since they resale both vendor's equipment. In summary, what we discovered is that Cisco's equipment is inadequate, their specs are dishonest and misleading, their sales folks side step the issues and spread FUD. Juniper, on the other hand, really nailed it with their architecture. They are professional to deal with, probably because they know they have superior equipment, and their specs are honest showing performance for worst case small packets and also mix traffic and is inline with our testing. Those are the qualities that make a successful company and not just a name.
RE: Anti-establishment crowd
You definitely don't fall under the group I was describing. However, I have seen people who use the wrong Cisco product, then blame Cisco for the failure. I knew a University once, who had a 7200 as a border router. It worked well 99% of the time. It failed when there was high packet rate DoS attack. The router could not maintain the BGP connection. However, putting a 7604 in place, that problem disappeared and never returned. Now the DoS impacts a single host or a few hosts, but not the entire campus. While I see the point you are making, I have also seen people use the wrong Cisco gear for the given task and then complain and jump to Juniper. I know a guy who changed to Juniper because his local Cisco acct team was terrible, not because the products were terrible. Juniper has their problems too. Can FUD by Cisco be enough to keep them in 86% of enterprise routing (excluding the highest end gear)? Or in 60%+ of service provider networks still? If Cisco were so bad, and Juniper so great, I've got to believe that the plain, simple market share would bear that out, especially since Juniper has been around so long now. But that's not happening.
Juniper Math
I guess they use the same math for counting OSes that they used for counting options. My math comes up with 3 versions of JunOS (junos, junos-es for the j series, and junos-se for the E series).
Good post on the Nexus 7000
I found a good post on the differentiator of nexus 7000 at www.networldbuzz.com. i guess having fiber channel is unique