Juniper founder: Cisco has too many operating systems

It’s perhaps no small coincidence that Cisco makes a major announcement just days before Juniper does or hosts an important event. The day before Juniper unveiled its EX line of Ethernet enterprise switches last month, Cisco introduced its new data center switch, the Nexus 7000. This week was no different, as Cisco unveiled its next-generation ASR1000 edge routers just as Juniper held its annual analyst conference in Southern California. Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy stole some of Juniper CTO and founder Pradeep Sindhu’s time at the conference to gauge his thoughts on Cisco’s new router as well as a range of other topics.

What is your impression of Cisco’s ASR 1000 router?

Let me just make one broad characterization. In sharp contrast to what Juniper tries to do -- which is to have a single operating system, consistent architecture – our competition seems to specialize in producing a new operating system with each product line. And this doesn’t serve the customer well. 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. When we add functionality to the operating system, we integrate it in. We don’t sort of patch it on the side. But I’m much more comfortable talking about what Juniper does rather than what our competitors do.

OK, but how can your competitors remain successful if they keep coming out with multiple operating systems that increase complexity and inconsistency?

[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.

Where does Juniper have to go with its product line, operating system, ASICs to address next-generation data center and infrastructure opportunities?

The primary place we have to go to is larger scale. [Also, the] interaction between computing and storage and the network is going to become very important.

The [Juniper Control System] 1200 is a very important product. It begins to address the scaling aspects of the control plane. One of the issues we had seen is that if you try to put the control plane into the router – and traditionally we’ve done that, our competition has done that – one of the issues you end up with is that as computing power has increased trying to fit it into a predetermined form factor becomes challenging over time. So the ability to go to a standards-based platform and be able to have both the latest microprocessor technology, be able to iterate it as fast as the technology is changing in the market, and to be able to have storage inside the same platform is of tremendous benefit to the scaling of the control plane.