Juniper’s MX has been one of its most successful products, and it’s not surprising that the company wants to build on that success. On Tuesday they announced a series of enhancements to the MX “Universal Edge”, all designed to host service intelligence close to the network edge. That’s a worthy goal, and in my view it’s where the market is heading. The question is whether Juniper’s approach to that goal is the optimum one, and that’s harder to tell than it should be.
There seem to be two pieces to Juniper’s announcement; a set of MX applications that enhance the Universal Edge concept by extending network capabilities, and a set of applications that actually host “non-network” functionality on the MX. This is supported via a new x86 line card that runs Linux. The keynote application for this card is video caching or CDN functionality, though it also appears that you could use it for other types of content like advertising.
Some of the stuff that’s proposed for the Universal Edge is network-related. One set of capabilities allows operators to host what would ordinarily be “subnet services” for smaller branch offices, including things like DHCP, firewall, NAT, and monitoring services. This seems logical and could also facilitate virtual networking since those kinds of services are what augment basic Level 2 LAN services in the Quantum virtual network model of OpenStack. Juniper does say the new products facilitate cloud services, but that seems aimed at VPN linking to cloud services.
I don’t have any issue with making the network edge more network-functional, but I do question whether it’s a good idea to host CDN caching on network devices. Operators have characterized network boxes as “the most expensive real estate in our infrastructure” and indicated that they are generally more interested in dumbing these boxes down than in adding server applications to them (that’s what’s behind the SDN interest, after all). They tell me that they would prefer a software-CDN approach, one that can be fit onto any suitable set of servers, than even an appliance-based model. That seems to speak against a device-hosted cache. Then there’s the lesson of Cisco, whose AON board was aimed at non-network service features—and never got any market traction. You could argue that AON was too early, but that’s a hard argument to prove given overall trends toward cloud-hosting features.
The future is the cloud and the cloud is software and servers, which means the future of the network edge is cloud facilitation. The new announcement is promoted on Juniper’s homepage with the obligatory cloud billboard, and there does seem to be some movement here by Juniper toward creating a cloud-ready network. What’s missing is the specific notion of what such a network would look like and how it would tie to the SDN stuff that most everyone sees as the way the network adapts to the cloud. Juniper has made two general public introductions to its vision of SDN but neither of them has included a specific product architecture or roadmap. The most recent was a virtual event that promoted the notion of a single aggregate view of multiple devices, which sounds a lot like the Node Unifier for the MX that’s included in this announcement. Thus, it’s looking like SDN-by-synthesis, and that makes it harder to understand the positioning.
It’s also less effective for Juniper, so it’s hard for me to understand why they’d take the risk. It’s hard not to see two almost-competing internal-company threads here. On the one hand Juniper seems determined to talk about boxes as the core of the future, including all the usual hype about how this or that feature accelerates time to market or reduces TCO. This is a very tactical approach that doesn’t lend itself to presenting grand ideas. On the other, the company does seem to realize that it needs some architectural meat on the box bones, especially in the areas of cloud and SDN. But you can’t create that message by leaking little pieces of it in box stories. It would sure be nice if these threads converged somehow to create tactics that clearly built into a longer-term infrastructure strategy that made sense.
Light Reading reports a Juniper layoff, and Tech Target says that it’s directed at least somewhat toward the QFabric team. If true, that would be a real surprise given Juniper’s cloud positioning. Their primary asset in the cloud is the data center network, and QFabric could be combined with PTX to create an optical cloud virtual data center that could span the globe and offer a real differentiator to the company. Fabrics are particularly strong in hosting virtual networks and have a strong link with SDN (which technology would be the key to link QFabric and PTX in the first place). On the other hand, QFabric is regarded by most financial analysts as problematic and I agree the positioning of the product has never lived up to the technology. Which only shows how important it is to understand those pesky architectures and markets. Listening, Juniper?