BARCELONA: The founder of networking seller Juniper has lashed out at arch-rival Cisco at its EMEA press summit, claiming that its Unified Computing Technique initiative is ambitious to pull off successfully. Pradeep Sindhu, director, founder, & vice chairman of the board, also believes customers are rejecting the know-how, preferring to stay seller neutral.
Juniper is still hard at work by itself multi-year Stratus Project, which aims to “flatten” datacentre networking in to a single layer, making infrastructure less complex to administrate & implement. Sindhu says planning for the project started as far back as 2006.
“We started the conception of the Stratus project in 2006 & began seriously the design work in 2008. It took us six long years of trying to understand the issue, figure out what role Juniper could play. Juniper is a pure-play networking company – they don’t require to build computers & storage deices & other things,” they declares.
For Sindhu, Cisco’s solution of building its own servers in addition to its current range of networking gear is an unwieldy solution: “This issue is insanely complicated, & for any company to think that they can solve the issues in computing & storage as well as individuals who specialise in the [individual technologies] is a tall order. They are trying to bite off over they can chew – there is no query in my mind.”
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“You’ll finish up with average solutions. In the event you look at UCS for example, it misses the issue of large-scale organizations. It is a solution which is intended to solve Cisco’s issue , which is: how do you increase your revenues? It doesn’t solve the customer’s issue. In fact, it forces the customer to get locked in to Cisco solutions,” they adds.
With vendors in the market increasingly moving towards consolidation & in-house – HP’s acquisition of 3Com & Cisco’s move to build servers, at the cost of relationships with long-term partners Dell & IBM – plenty of have questioned Juniper’s desire to go it alone & possibly forgo new streams of revenue. Sindhu says customers have not expressed a powerful desire for these kinds of solutions.
“My discussions with customers is that they require to run away as speedy as feasible. There is one attraction [of UCS]: you have a one-stop shop. But the opposite of attraction is the fear that they will get locked in to a proprietary & elderly solution. That is the fear that is being realized as they speak,” states Sindhu.
Juniper execs at the event declined to set a date for when products & services based on Stratus would see the light of day, sticking to earlier statements about general availability in 2011.