Juniper: Promising entry, needs more seasoning

Company: Juniper
Entry: Stratus Project
Morning line: 12 to 1
Tip sheet: Promising late entry, needs another year or so of seasoning before it can take on the leaders

Juniper Networks doesn't intend to let enterprise switch nemesis Cisco take the next-generation data center race unchallenged. So to Cisco's Unified Computing System, Juniper ponies up the Stratus Project.

Through Stratus, Juniper intends on providing a converged data center fabric, says Andy Ingram, vice president of product marketing and business development for the company's Data Center Business Group. It will provide the networking and security pieces, while partnering for compute, storage and software. One of those partners presumably would be IBM, which Juniper has teamed with for work on cloud computing.

Juniper's fabric contributions will include a converged Ethernet/Fibre Channel switching interconnect, multiple security services, WAN acceleration and routing. The goal, Ingram says, is to provide connectivity and security services for applications within a data center, between data centers and into the cloud.

Juniper also intends on providing the management services to provision, update, configure, monitor and repair the network and security elements and to cooperate with the overall data center management software, Ingram says.

That Juniper's business model "is not predicated on prolonging legacy information infrastructures" will provide the company a competitive edge, Ingram says. "We are free to rethink the data center network architecture and deliver … a network in the data center that is simpler, faster, more reliable, more environmentally friendly and more economical than other vendors. The simplicity is inherent to the innovative architecture vs. being hidden and camouflaged by abstractions layered on a legacy architecture," he says.

Still, Juniper is a bit of a long shot, says Anne Skamarock, a research director at Focus Consulting.

"Yes, of course, Juniper can [present a unified data center strategy]. But will it be successful?" Skamarock wonders. "Cisco may have a chance of pulling this off because it's essentially been doing specialized computing for years and it has a huge market leadership that gives it access at the executive level to a lot of these data centers. For a smaller company or dark horse to come in at this point it would have to do something incredibly compelling and very different from what Cisco and other bigger players have today."

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