Juniper blasts into the enterprise switching market

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 31 January 2008 12:50

IT Industry - Strategy

Page added that when Juniper was contemplating its move into the enterprises switching market it weighed up acquiring an existing player against an in-house product development and concluded that the challenges of re-engineering an acquired technology to run Junos would be too great.

According to Juniper, the EX-series switches are designed for campus, data centre and remote office deployment and feature many of the same carrier-class hardware and software architectures found in Juniper's core routers that were purpose-built to support the convergence of data, voice, and video onto a single always-on network.

The initial range comprises the EX 3200 series, EX 4200 and EX 8200. The EX 3200 series switches are fixed-configuration ethernet platforms offering "a simple, cost-effective, standalone solution for low-density regional and corporate office deployments." They come in 24- and 48-port version for wiring closet installation and support 10/100/1000BASE-T connectivity. Full and partial Power over Ethernet (PoE) options are available.

The EX 4200 uses Juniper's Virtual Chassis Technology and also comes in 24- and 48-port 10/100/1000BASE-T configurations but the Virtual Chassis technology enables up to 10 EX 4200 series switches to be interconnected over a 128Gbps backplane to create a single virtual switch supporting up to 480 10/100/1000BASE-T ports and up to 40 1GbE or 20 10GbE uplink ports.

 Juniper will offer two EX 8200 series switches – an eight-slot 1.6tbps chassis with 64 ports and a 16-slot 3.2tbps chassis with 128 ports. The EX3200 and 4200 will be available in March, the 8200 in the second half of 2008. Page said that Juniper's existing network of channel partners should be adequate to take the new products to market.

"The partners we have are more than capable of handling the EX... They have been waiting for this for a long time. One criticism of Juniper has been the lack of a local switch...This has been a long time coming."

Cisco is the lead player in the Australian market by a long chalk followed by HP ProCurve in number two and then a whole host of smaller players.