Juniper University

Welcome to Juniper University: A case study in lessons learned the hard way.

What is Juniper University? Simply put, “JU” is a series of brief educational articles that offer side by side comparisons of Juniper Networks products to their Cisco counterpart.

The idea for JU came from our own discovery of the huge price and performance advantages that Juniper Networks offers when we did a comparison of Juniper vs Cisco products.

Once a Cisco reseller, we thought recommending Cisco vs Juniper products was the right thing to do. Heck, we were a Cisco shop ourselves. Juniper was legendary in the SSL/VPN, core router, and security markets. Then we heard about Juniper Networks entry into the enterprise switch and router market and decided to check them out.

What we found was nothing less than remarkable. With an aggressively priced portfolio including EX Series switches, J Series and SRX secure routers, Juniper offers end to end enterprise network connectivity with huge price and performance advantages over Cisco. As a result, when faced with the question of "Cisco or Juniper?", we decided right then and there to become a Juniper reseller and refresh our own network with all Juniper versus Cisco products.

Why all the hype over a networking company? Simple: With Juniper networks, Cisco customers, like us, can now get better performing technology, a single version Junos operating system and dramatically lower annual networking hardware and support costs.

The full JU curriculum covers a lot of stuff and we knew it was important. So instead of trying to cover everything at oncei in the Cisco Juniper comparison debate, we hoped by creating a series of brief articles, or “classes,” you’ll learn about Juniper and Cisco, and be able to ask us some questions along the way.