Juniper dumps DX application-acceleration gear
DX hardware, software and licenses discontinued
By
Tim Greene
,
Network World
, 01/22/2008
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Juniper Networks is discontinuing its DX line of application acceleration boxes that load balance, offload processing from Web servers and guard against denial-of-service
attacks.
The company has not announced details of when or how it will shut down the product line or wind down support for it. Juniper
indicates it may be terminating the DX because it regards it as insufficiently distinguishable from competitors' devices.
"Our ability to deliver sustained differentiation is the nexus of the opportunity in front of us. We remain fully committed
to capitalizing on this opportunity. To this end, Juniper has made the formal decision to end-of-life the DX hardware, software
and licenses," Juniper responded when asked about rumors concerning the discontinuation.
The gear competes against products made by Array Networks, Citrix, Crescendo, F5, Foundry and others. (Learn more about Application Acceleration products from our Application Acceleration and WAN Traffic Optimization Buyer's
Guide.)
Layoffs associated with the end of the DX were also rumored, and Juniper didn't respond directly to whether that was true.
"Every effort is being made to identify new roles for all employees affected by this decision," Juniper's statement says.
News of dropping the DX came as a surprise to one customer that uses the gear. "That thing works," says David O'Berry, director
of IT at the South Carolina Department of Probation, Parole and Pardon Services.
He says in addition to load balancing and protecting against DoS attacks, DX's TCP streamlining improves the performance of
his T-1 lines. When he took the device offline for troubleshooting, the packet loss jumped to 30%, he says.
"The only way this makes sense is they're taking the DX software and somehow integrating it into the WX," O'Berry says, referring
to Juniper's WAN acceleration gear. WX appliances sit at both ends of corporate WAN links and through a variety of compression and optimization techniques squeeze more data
across the connections.
Juniper bought the DX technology from Redline Networks in 2005 for $132 million. O'Berry says from a customer point of view,
the gear never seemed integrated fully with Juniper's other products. "It still seemed like it was Redline," he says. "You
talked about Redline if you talked about the DX."
He says that as a big user of Juniper gear, he isn't worried about whether the end-of-life will disrupt his network. "I have
confidence they will make it right," he says.
This is the complete text of Juniper's response to questions about whether it is discontinuing its DX line and whether there
are associated layoffs:
"The strength of Juniper is based on the competitive advantage that we bring to the market coupled with the increasing criticality
of high-performance networking to our customers' business success. Our ability to deliver sustained differentiation is the
nexus of the opportunity in front of us. We remain fully committed to capitalizing on this opportunity. To this end, Juniper
has made the formal decision to end-of-life the DX hardware, software and licenses. We will work diligently to continue to
support existing customer installations of the DX and successfully transition customers to other application acceleration
offerings within our high-performance network infrastructure offerings in the future. At Juniper our cornerstone principle
of putting employees first and investing in their success continues to correlate directly to the success of our company. Every
effort is being made to identify new roles for all employees affected by this decision. In a business environment of constant
change, we maintain a relentless commitment to execution and serving the high-performance networking requirements of our customers."
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Comments (20)
RE: Juniper dumps DX application-acceleration gearBy Keith on January 22, 2008, 2:08 pmTheir salesforce was horrid in comparison to F5. The product wasn't progressing like F5 and they showed a shady committment to aggressive development of features....
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What does this mean for Cisco ACE?By Cisconet on January 22, 2008, 4:39 pmCisco is also in the load balancing application acceleration business with its Application Control Engine (ACE), a blade that slides into its Catalyst 6500 switches...
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Usually the challenge is on the sales sideBy Anonymous on January 22, 2008, 4:45 pmWhen a big company buys a small one and puts that portfolio under the same sales force, here is what happens: nothing. The sales guys will think "why bother so much...
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Citrix and F5 lead the wayBy Anonymous on January 22, 2008, 5:19 pmJuniper got out of the business because it couldn't keep up with Citrix NetScaler and F5 Big IP. Cisco should do the same, but probably won't.
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Very unfortunateBy Anonymous on January 22, 2008, 6:27 pmThese are excellent units and nothing could touch them as AFE's. Sure Citrix and F5 work as plain old LB's but if you use a lot of app rules and need the horsepower...
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F5 WebAccelerator is more than a load balancerBy Anonymous on January 22, 2008, 9:43 pmI would recommend that you check back in on the F5 product line. It has been a long time (6 years)since they sold "just a load balancer". The BIG-IP WebAccelerator...
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