Juniper this week stepped up its battle with Cisco on multiple fronts with a sweeping technology and partnership announcement in New York. The event was hosted by the New York Stock Exchange, Juniper's highest profile enterprise account for its high-performance networking thrust.
There, Juniper laid down the gauntlet. It once again pitched JUNOS as an open platform upon which to write and host virtually any application on any platform; it unveiled its newest chipset, called "Trio," that CTO Pradeep Sindhu claimed could download the entire Library of Congress in 12 seconds; it rolled out MX-series Ethernet routers designed for massive scale that, when equipped with Trio, provide a 2.6x to 4x performance gain over Alcatel-Lucent's 7750 and Cisco's ASR 9000 routers, respectively; and it reiterated the deep partnerships it has with IBM, Dell and BLADE Network Technologies for data center and other IT requirements. IBM, for example, is now OEMing Juniper's SRX Services Gateway in addition to the previously announced routers and switches it is private labeling.
Missing, however, was meat on the bones its Stratus cloud computing intiative, such as product deliverables. Also, there was a lot of table pounding on its ambitions in the data center but absolutely no mention of its intentions with standards and technology like FibreChannel over Ethernet. And though Juniper clarified its direction with 4G wireless -- it disclosed Project Falcon, an internally developed mobile packet core and subscriber management platform -- it gave no timelines or partnership identities around it.
Indeed, Juniper's splash may have been too broadly focused on impressive, gee whiz technology and not specifically enough on transitional markets -- like FCoE and 4G mobile -- and how and when it plans to address them with product. But it's clear the company has been forging the iron for its weapons; can it arm itself adequately and shoot straight and true?
More from Cisco Subnet:
- Cisco rival Brocade for sale?
- HP blade counters Cisco security approach
- What's next for Cisco after Tandberg deal?
- Manly Man IOS Features
- Cisco Releases IOS 15.0
- Cisco training and network design books up for grabs in October
Win great stuff from Cisco Subnet Like e-mail? Subscribe to the Cisco Alert newsletter.
Like RSS readers? Subscribe to the Cisco Subnet RSS feedFollow all Cisco Subnet bloggers on Twitter.
Follow Jim Duffy on Twitter
The Cisco Subnet blog is written by Network World managing editor Jim Duffy and is the official blog of Network World's Cisco Subnet community. The Cisco Subnet site is managed by Online Community Editor Julie Bort. Cisco Subnet is the independent voice of Cisco customers and is your gateway to daily Cisco news, blogs, opinion, books, prize giveaways and more. Visit the Cisco Subnet home page daily and while you are there, subscribe to the Cisco Alert e-mail newsletter, which includes news and views generated by the Cisco Subnet community as well as Cisco-related stories on Network World and elsewhere on the Web.
The Leader in Network Knowledge
Juniper vs. Cisco
It is interesting that Juniper is now trying to attack Cisco on all fronts: Enterprise, Carrier, Wireless. The only thing missing is a consumer effort.. Maybe Netgear is next..
IMHO, Juniper cannot get caught in the trap of being "good enough" in all these areas. The focus and innovation that Juniper brought to the carrier routing market enabled them to challenge Cisco and force them to respond. IF they are to be successful in Enterprise, they need to innovate and offer solutions that again challenge Cisco and make them respond. Just offering systems that are comparable wont do it... It is too easy to stay with what you have if they alternative is just "comparable"
Post new comment