Will the Cisco ASR 9000 kill the Juniper MX960?

It appears Cisco may have pulled the rug out from under Juniper.

Last week, Avian Securities Senior Telecom Research Analyst - Catharine Trebnick said in her research note:

"In the Carrier Ethernet segment, the market is extremely competitive and according to our industry sources, pricing is in free fall. Operators are selling IPVPN with Cisco pricing at the high end and /or Adtran pricing at the low end and are keeping Juniper routers just where they are in the network, close to the core.

"This dynamic changes our original thesis, that the Juniper MX Ethernet switch would gain traction in some accounts as operators retired their CSCO Catalyst switches. In addition, our industry contacts have indicated that Cisco is pushing their ASR 9000 at very competitive prices."

Interestingly, Cisco has been promoting the competitive performance test results between its ASR 9000 vs. the Juniper MX960. It hired Miercom to conduct a test that came up with following results (take these results with a grain of salt … keep in mind that Cisco paid for the test, the test was conducted in a Cisco facility in San Jose, and the test cases "were based on parameters set by Cisco," Miercom says):

	Cisco ASR 9000 hardware architecture protected high priority traffic under all congestion conditions tested. The Juniper MX960 failed to maintain high priority traffic under the same conditions.
	Fabric-based multicast replication of the Cisco ASR 9000 architecture, proved to be more scalable and resilient than the Distributed Tree Replication (DTR) multicast replication scheme from Juniper. The Cisco ASR 9000 protected both IP Video and Video on Demand (VoD) traffic at all times regardless of the type of failure.
	Cisco ASR 9000 achieved zero packet loss for all services during High Availability testing. The Juniper MX960 demonstrated unpredictable and severe packet loss depending on the type of failure, under moderate service scale.
	During link failures, the Cisco ASR 9000 converged up to sixty times faster than the Juniper MX960, protecting services and reducing service outage to a minimum, under moderate service scale.

View the complete Miercom Cisco ASR 9000 vs. Juniper MX960 lab test results as well as more results of Cisco vs. Competitor Lab Tests.

What's your take, will the Cisco ASR 9000 kill the Juniper MX960?

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• Cisco

• LANs / WANs

• Avian Securities Senior Telecom Research Analyst - Catharine Trebnick

• Cisco ASR 9000 architecture

• Cisco is pushing their ASR 9000 at very competitive prices

• Juniper MX960 lab test results