Juniper Jumps on Top-of-Rack 10GbE for High-Performance Infrastructure

| Feb 26, 2009 | Enterprise Network Systems | Competitive Update

| Analyst: Bill Terrill

Current Perspective: Positive
Vendor Importance: Moderate
Market Impact: Moderate

Event Summary

February 24, 2009 – Juniper Networks announced the expansion of its Ethernet switching product portfolio with the EX2500 line of 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch. The EX2500 line is targeted at high-density 10GbE deployments where high-performance networking with low latency, high availability and energy efficiencies are key requirements for enterprise and service provider data center networks. The EX2500's functionality and increased performance will enable customers to accelerate the deployment of business-enabling applications and services across the network.

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Positive on Juniper’s announcement of the EX2500 10GbE top-of-rack switch because this offers a competitive product for high density data centers and shows the company’s seriousness about gaining significant product share in the enterprise market. Juniper had retreated from the enterprise, but has moved back into this business. The Juniper sales force now has a new offering that allows them to focus on the latest high performance data center requirements and emphasizes Juniper’s commitment to this market.

• Vendor Importance: Moderate to Juniper, because its product line previously had no 10GbE only fixed switches. If a customer required dense 10GbE, Juniper could offer only modular switching, which doesn’t fit well with the dense rack mount server environments now becoming common. This announcement places Juniper in league with switch vendors focused on very high performance devices such as Blade Network Technologies, Woven Systems and Arista, and ahead of major vendors such as Cisco, HP Procurve, 3Com and Brocade. Juniper will now (temporarily) be able to compete for the top end of high performance data center business without direct competition from other major vendors.

• Market Impact: Moderate on the enterprise fixed switching market, as Juniper has taken a technical lead among vendors in addressing very high performance enterprise data center requirements. This is a direction that was clearly indicated by the specialist vendors but not one that had previously been of high importance for main line vendors. Although Juniper is still not a significant force in enterprise switch markets, its offering of a fixed 10GbE switch will force other vendors to follow suit sooner rather than later.

Recommended Competitor Actions

• Major competitors, such as Cisco, 3Com, HP ProCurve and so on, should point to Juniper’s lack of penetration in the enterprise market space. These vendors can imply that Juniper has been unreliable as an on-going partner for enterprises over the years.

• For the majority of existing data centers, 10GbE is currently only really needed for backbone networks. Competitors can focus on this large class of customers to point out that the Juniper EX2500 line, like those from Woven and Arista, is really only appropriate in the highest performance data centers. The extra cost of top-of-rack 10GbE isn’t justifiable in most environments today.

• Competitors focused heavily on the high performance switches, such as Woven, Arista and Force10, should point to their longer history of providing these high end products as well as their (generally) higher density offerings. These vendors will need to price competitive, as they offer fewer alternative infrastructure products that can be used throughout the data center.

• The top tier vendors will need to introduce their own 10GbE switch products that compete with the Juniper offerings. These products will become critical in head-to-head competition over the next 24 months as enterprises find the need for 10GbE more critical in highly virtualized data center environments.

CLIENTS ONLY

Competitive Positives and Concerns

Recommended Vendor Actions

| Client access - Full report in Enterprise Network Systems | More information

Top