Monday, February 21, 2011

The Cisco Nexus or the Juniper EX Series?

About Juniper’s EX8200:

Overview: Juniper has been in backbone and provider networks for over 11 years. The EX8200 is the flagship of Juniper’s EX series line of switches. With a full product portfolio all running one JUNOS operating system version, Juniper gives customers a simplified network from the WAN to the core and right on down to the wireless network.

The Good: Lower price points, less power consumption, one operating system, very reasonable maintenance and support costs with better overall performance than Cisco’s Nexus.

The Bad: It’s not Cisco. If you are not familiar with JUNOS, it will require learning a new operating system.
About Cisco’s Nexus 7000:

Overview: The Nexus 7000 series is Cisco’s newest core and datacenter switch offering. Announced in January 2009, it is designed to consolidate IP, storage and inter-process communication (IPC). The Nexus uses the new and unproven NX-OS operating system.

The Good: It is Cisco – With 80% market share, it’s safe to assume you can leverage Nexus features while easily integrating the NX-OS into your environment.

The Bad: You’ll pay a hefty price tag for it. Its overall performance is lower and its power consumption is higher than Juniper’s EX8200 series. The Nexus 7000 uses Cisco’s NX-OS operating system, increasing the product’s complexity and raising operating costs.

Conclusion: New operating systems aside, we took a hard look at the performance specs and, in the end, it was no contest. We chose Juniper. The bottom line was better performance with lower overall operating costs.

“There has been a lot of hype around the Cisco Nexus. What’s driving this is the unprecedented demand for bandwidth and network managers on a quest to find a solution. Since Nexus runs NX-OS, IT will be introducing a new operating system into their environment. If you are going to introduce a new operating system anyway, this is a great opportunity for data centers to leverage Juniper’s flagship EX8200 and the JUNOS operating system.”

1 comment:

  1. Hmm, sounds A LOT like this company's review:

    http://www.glcomp.com/media-room/juniper-university/ex8200-vs-nexus

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