The Monster Switches of Cisco and Juniper


I’m having fun looking at the new Cisco Nexus and the Juniper EX series boxes.

I particularly like the 256 x 10GbE ports per rack feature (noted in Lightreading). Wow! Juniper even says this is wire-rate.

On a Internet design front. The focus of these boxes is intra-datacenter so it is no surprise that connectivity is Ethernet based and that there is some discussion of storage interfaces. But there is “zero” discussion of telecom connectivity. I take that to mean that they assume Ethernet connectivity to every kind of equipment in the datacenter. That includes the outside connections.

I also like how close the Cisco-stated $250M development cost is to my buddy Stacy’s estimates of such a beast a few years back. You were spot on dude!

This entry was posted on January 29, 2008 at 12:28 pm and is filed under tech commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “The Monster Switches of Cisco and Juniper”

  1. Omar Sultan Says:
    January 31, 2008 at 5:24 pm

    Iain:

    You are spot-on. While the Cicso Nexus is,as you say, a “monster” switch, we still expect the typical data center to be built from a blend of Nexus, Catalyst and other products like the the Cisco 7600.

  2. Iain Verigin Says:
    February 1, 2008 at 1:07 pm

    Thanks for the kind words. The Nexus definitely looks like a beast that is gonna pull thru lotsa “feeder” boxes.

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