Juniper execs share network vision

I mean, just looking at the MX3D, the total cost of ownership is at least 40% percent less than most of our competition. And the MX3D will use a tenth of the power of anybody else that delivers 2.6 terabytes at the edge. That is huge for helping to transform the business model for a service provider and to reduce the total cost of ownership in the enterprise.

There has been a fair amount of industry discussion about the need to delayer enterprise networks to simplify them. What's your take

Yen: A three-layer structure is conceptually very helpful, particularly in the data center. You have access, aggregation and the core. But with today's technology, particularly what Juniper is offering, we believe pretty much all data centers -- except a handful of large core operators such as Amazon and Google -- can be supported using a two-tier structure rather than resorting to three tiers.

When you reduce a tier, a layer, by definition you save in cost, you save in power and you have better latency that translates to better performance. So this is why we're winning a number of data center deals -- including the New York Stock Exchange -- with our two-tier approach, the fixed configuration EX3200 and EX4200 in the front, and the modular EX 8200 switches in the back. And very frequently, MX will become part of the equation when the customer looks at edge routing.So you squeeze out the aggregation layer.

Perdikou: You always have the access layer because that's the highest volume, but instead of using a middle layer to reduce the number of ports, if you have sufficient port counts at the core, which is ultimately the fabric providing the switching function, you can subsume the aggregation requirement.