Juniper Unveils High-Performance Switches Aimed at the Enterprise

Juniper Networks announced last week a new, high-end switch aimed at large enterprises that fills out its extensive switching platform and provides solution providers with products to meet the needs of customers of any size.

Chris Spain, vice president of product management and technical marketing in Juniper’s Ethernet products group, says that with the launch of Juniper’s new EX 8216 switch, solution providers now have a solution specifically built to handle customers’ needs for increased performance and simplicity in cloud computing deployments.

The EX 8200 line, which includes the 16-slot EX8216 and the eight-slot EX8208, delivers extremely high port density, power efficiency and scalability that customers need for their cloud computing environments and to support next-generation Web 2.0 applications, he says, for customers of any size.

“We now have a comprehensive switching platform for solution providers so they can cover very large enterprises, enterprises with branch offices, midmarket companies and even SMBs,” Spain says. “This offering tops off the portfolio and allows our partners to reach all the way up to the largest enterprises.”

The EX 8216 offers a per-slot capacity of 320G bps and delivers up to 2 billion packets per second of performance, meaning it’s not only optimized to take advantage of 10GB Ethernet speeds, but is also "future-proof" and will be able to easily migrate enterprises to 100 GbE when that technology becomes viable, Spain says.

“Our current switch fabric gives performance of 320GB per slot. We’re only using a fraction of that, and future faster fabrics will allow us to grow,” he says. “These platforms are built and ready to accommodate those speeds when they become available.”

Spain says that Juniper’s competitive advantage lies in the ability of solution providers to drastically streamline customers’ data center architectures and to offer cutting-edge solutions that address the needs of customers wanting to take advantage of cloud computing. Since all of Juniper’s products share a common operating system, there’s no need for multiple layers of switching, routing and security.

In addition, a virtual chassis can interconnect different switches via a high-speed connection with 128GB of aggregate bandwidth, and allows connected smaller switches to look like one switch, Spain says. This functionality can decrease the number of layers within a data center and essentially collapse two layers of switching into one, saving customers money and easing solution providers' management burdens.

“We allow solution providers to connect so many more components using less equipment. Really, half of the switches in data centers today are just connecting one server to others, and they’re making other vendors richer,” Spain says.

Buying less data center equipment means lowered capital expense spending for customers, and Junos also allows for operational expense savings, he says. Solution providers can leverage these benefits to provide a very compelling total cost of ownership story for potential customers, he says.

The ability to reach customers of any size and to easily integrate switching and routing into existing data centers can open up a lot of opportunity for solution providers, Spain says. While partners’ opportunities in the data center were formerly limited to security, networking or servers, they now have access to a complete portfolio of solutions that can help them add to their existing network infrastructure practices, he says.

In addition, Juniper’s Network and Security Manager (NSM) software provides a unified device management solution for the EX Series, as well as Juniper routers and security devices.

“This is a really compelling adjacency to that sale they had previously, and they can leverage their training on Junos to expand their practices,” Spain says.