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.