Juniper Networks to Combine with HPE (opens in new tab)

> printers, which used to be a good business

Good business as in earning money or as producing customer satisfaction? I don't know about the former, but I do know that HP printers are a horrible user experience these days. The printer is connected via USB, but it cannot be used without an internet connection to their data collection and ink selling cloud nonsense. I will never by anything from that brand again. (I used to be a HP fan since the 1980s.)

HPE took the PC server business. I'd hardly call that "wretched"?

> HPE is the wretched refuse that's left.

Cray tends to disagree...

Doesn't HPE still have a competent HPC division with Cray and the Chapel language?

That was one of the worst things I've ever had the misfortune of reading.

Well someone is diligently using latest version Corporate BS generator which has now included AI* stuff.

> At Juniper, “AI” stands for “All In.”

This is where I vomited.

You think you did. But if you were using Juniper's AI-Native Networking, you'd know for sure.

I would very much like someone in charge at either HPE or Juniper to explain to me in plain English what that means exactly, in practical terms. I doubt it means anything.

Juniper died today.

We have been testing equipment from other vendors, so that we could replace Juniper in the future, it needed. Those plans just became much more relevant, unless the plan is that Juniper takes the lead on HPE networking.

HPE would have been purchased by Micro Focus is it wasn't a hardware company. It's really sad to see the decline, HP actually made some nice stuff, 15 - 20 years ago.

Aruba seems to have been mostly left alone post acquisition...

Nimble is still shockingly solid

Why only 90%? For smart phone operating systems it's higher I'd assume (not counting China, that's not a free country anyway). Same for desktop computers.

A major failure of free market economics that is widely ignored by politics.

> a combined 90% market share.

I was under the impression Juniper market share had been falling consistently. But it sounds like there is a market where they are still doing well, what is it? Enterprise something?

HP had their own ProCurve networking and they also bought Aruba.

We don't know what HPE is going to do to Juniper specifically, but in general many acquisitions either raise prices or simplify the product line by canceling some products. In this case HPE may cancel some Aruba products and replace them with Mist equivalents.

I work at a network VAR partnered with both of these companies, but these thoughts are my own assumptions. HPE didn't immediately implode Aruba, I don't think they'll immediately implode Juniper either. That said, I don't think it's a good move as a fan of Juniper myself. I think Mist/AI led the desire for the acquisition, particularly with their performance in the lower end market last year vs HPE Aruba type products which usually win for higher end enterprise. I'm cautious about how they'll handle the other product lines, particularly on how much the care about them. Obviously nothing is disappearing overnight though, this will be something that shakes out over years.

I work in HPC, and we saw the quality of support completely plummet after HPE bought Cray.

Arista or whitebox switches, depending on how big you are and your appetite to DIY your network as code vs DIY writing configuration.

> What to do now, what to do...

csco beckons thee

> Across SRX

Good lord. I don’t know whether I respect or pity you.

There used to be a saying at Juniper: If there was an issue with MX, it was likely a config issue. If there was an issue with SRX it was likely a bug.

Was incredibly accurate more often than not.

I miss Netscreen.

HPE != HP

The HP you’re thinking of is now Agilent.

And this isn’t going to go well. Look at the downward slope of Aruba since HPE acquired them.

Having worked with every vendor under the sun for networking equipment across my career, I enjoy working with Juniper by far the most.

The configuration syntax works as expected, it's flexible but extensible in the right places and mostly has lots of knobs to tune things but without requiring extensive boilerplate to get things to work as expected.

The hardware seems to fit intelligent niches and actually does what it says on the spec sheets.

The system is FreeBSD, while that's a debatable choice in 2024 it's far better than the obscure OSes that others are using for their core systems.

At the end of the day you can always just "start shell user root" and be root on a FreeBSD system. If you're a bit crafty on most Juniper systems you can also run unsigned code if you like. Some Juniper platforms (and not talking about just the huge ones, some of the 1U pizzabox switches) allow you to run a full-blown Linux system alongside the FreeBSD image (because they are actually Linux running FreeBSD on a hypervisor).

JTAC was filled with skilled, intelligent engineers who actually cared and tried to solve your problems. (Not sure today as I haven't had to call them in years). The other TACs I've delt with were focused on call time and ticket handling metrics and would ask obviously pointless questions or repeat information you already provided for a fast close.

I still remember calling JTAC during one outage we had. First L1 engineer after my initial description of the problem basically came back and said something like "that sounds like a really bad outage, please open SSH from 1.2.3.4 and add this public key and I'll login and get the information for L3." Within about 15 minutes I was on the phone with an L3 engineer who correctly diagnosed and proposed a fix for the issue. Amazing support. Not perfect, I have some horror stories too, but, always with people who cared and far less than with C or other vendors TACs.

Very sad day.

Companies go with Juniper because they can outfit a data center at half the price of Cisco. NYSE did that a decade or more ago with their Mahwah data center.

Its not really a bad strategy. If you're going to have a large team of network engineers work continuously on a the Juniper tech stack, they'll get use to it - even if they were raised on Cisco IOS. Juniper stuff works just as well as the rest of them.

Juniper is pretty big, and probably the company most of the Cisco users are turning to, in my experience. Cisco has stagnated for so long and continue their attempt to push over prices solutions that simply isn't as good or modern as those of their competitors.

We continued to buy Cisco for longer than we should have, because "New stuff is surely around the corner", but it's not. Cisco still makes enterprise equipment that can't do IPv6. So we switched to Juniper three or four years ago, and may of our customers are doing or considering the same.

Cisco isn't the dominate play it used to be and is almost never the first choice for new projects anymore.

I've worked with a large number of vendors and I prefer juniper. They're very easy to write software against.

My work has been buying Juniper switches lately since CISCO has largely priced us out.

I remember Juniper making news way back when by using FreeBSD as the OS for the router and that was supposed to have saved them a bunch of development resources and earned a bunch of nerd cred.

Ebay

Soon it will all be Taco Bell.

The reverse happens too, HP split into HP and Agilent.