Juniper execs share network vision

So, that's what inspired Juniper's Stratus vision. It started in Pradeep Sindhu's organization [Juniper's CTO and founder] and Pradeep has been nurturing and fostering the effort and now it has grown into a full-scale project. We've been working on this in total probably more than two years.How will it be productized Is it an answer to Cisco's Nexus stuff

Perdikou: It's a natural thing to try to compare it because Nexus is Cisco's latest, newest push. There are a few areas we are thinking in common. For example, Nexus is striving toward converged Ethernet within the data center, and in that we are completely aligned. We believe the data center is heading in the direction with unified, converged traffic. If you build a 10-lane highway from downtown to the airport, you want all ten lanes usable by different kinds of vehicles -- whether they are four-door sedans or a pickup truck -- so you can smoothly, flexibly handle the traffic volume.

But Cisco's approach is very incremental. You look at the highly touted Nexus 7000, and pretty much all the sales right now are to replace aging Catalyst 6500s. There is very little real converged traffic being driven on the Nexus line, even though it has been in the market for a couple of years. And you look at the product implementation, it's a very incremental evolution from today's switch. It's nowhere near the fundamental architecture change as in Stratus.

Yen: What Stratus presents to the customer is intended to be a very simple image: a very scalable single data center fabric. Under the hood, Juniper is throwing all the experience we've gained over the last 13 [or] 14 years of cutting-edge switching technology and Internet core routing.

Such an offering takes a lot of effort -- the silicon investment, the hardware investment, multiple layers of software. Now, come back to Juniper and Cisco. If you look at it from the technology capability, Cisco has a lot of talented engineers, so we believe our respectable competitor will have the capability. And if you look at it from the resources perspective -- the ability to invest and create such a product -- they are resourceful enough. But from the business perspective, there's a significant difference between us.