Juniper EX Series Ethernet Switches Reviews

The solution is easy to use and has good integration.

In an upcoming release, Juniper Ethernet Switches could improve by having more microservices.

I have been using Juniper Ethernet Switches for approximately 10 years.

The solution is stable.

The scalability depends on the environment. For example, if the customer is in a healthcare environment then it is more scalable than other solutions.

We have approximately 30 large customers using this solution.

The technical support is very good. We can talk and have the support of the engineers who are developing the software and features.

We use many other switches, such as Aruba, Hewlett Packard, and Extreme Networks.

The installation is easy if you have certified engineers. You have to have some basic knowledge about the CLI of Juniper to do the installation.

The size of the team needed for the installation depends on the environment. However, we have approximately 10 certified engineers, which can do both, the installations and support of the solution. Additionally, we have architects, junior and senior consultants, and depending on the job we have to do, we can supply different types of engineers.

We have a partnership with Juniper and the price of the solution can be negotiated at a local or a corporate level with Juniper to meet our customer's needs.

There is a subscription payment model or you can purchase licenses on a one, two, and five-year basis. If you want decent support, the solution is not expensive.

I would recommend Juniper Ethernet Switches to others who want a well-integrated, stable, and easy-to-use solution.

I rate Juniper Ethernet Switches a nine out of ten.

Both Juniper and Cisco switches are interoperable. They talk to each other.

The interoperability is very good, but with some switches, it is very rare.

The problem is with Juniper is the OS. Not everyone knows about Junos. If they are comfortable with using Junos then it will be the best switch. More people are accustomed to the Cisco platform, especially with the CLI or the graphical interfaces.

Juniper has its own operating system called Junos.

I would like the ability to integrate with other operating systems.

I have worked for Juniper for three years.

It is very strong and very stable.

It's scalable. With the Juniper switches, all switches are L3 switches, which is a three-layer switch. 

The 24 port EX2300 comes with four slots of 10 gig fiber.

We have approximately 30 percent of the market share for clients.

There is no improvement needed with technical support.

The initial setup is very easy. The setup is not a problem, as long as you know the operating system very well, especially the Junos operating system. 

As long as you understand the operating system, Juno's interface, and all of the commands, it doesn't take much time to deploy. It's very easy.

It's similar to Cisco, but you need to concentrate. 

You need two to three people to maintain this solution.

The pricing is very aggressive. The only disadvantage with Juniper is the modules are very expensive lately.

It could be cheaper, but they are always expensive. 

If you want support with Juniper you will have to use Juniper modules, otherwise, you don't get the technical support.

For example, third-party modules can be integrated into Cisco, but with Juniper, if you want technical support directly, you can only use the Juniper modules. When tech support takes control, they will recognize whether it is a Juniper module or third-party modules.

Juniper switches come with either one year, three years, or five years of support.

When comparing, Cisco comes with five years.

If you look at the market shares, Cisco is more than Juniper. 

I would definitely recommend this solution to others, but not Huawei. I would not recommend Huawei, there is no chance for Huawei in the market.

I would rate Juniper Ethernet Switches a six out of ten.

We are using this solution as the current network infrastructure in the company.

The most valuable feature is switching on our network.

Wireless and monitoring definitely could be improved. 

I would like to see better monitoring in the next release.

I have been using Juniper Ethernet Switches for five years.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is okay, it could be better. The configuration could be easier, and more simple.

We have approximately 500 users. All of the departments are on a campus-style network with shared buildings and one compound. All of them are interconnected with fiber and have users in multiple buildings. There are approximately 12 buildings.

When we are trying to troubleshoot, we will find the support-type documentation.

We haven't had any issues where we couldn't find the documentation.

Previously, we were using another solution that was not able to provide a certain aspect in terms of LAN security. That is the reason why we switched to Juniper.

We had another contender, Meraki, which is another Cisco product. In terms of management, monitoring seems better than Juniper.

The initial setup was complex.

It's was $100,000 per year.

There are no additional costs other than the licensing fee.

We were evaluating Cisco, HPE, and Juniper. The cost was a big factor in our decision to go with Juniper.

We will be doing an upgrade internally, so we are a bit undecided on whether or not we will continue using this product, or a new solution altogether. 

We are evaluating the price and system functionality.

It's not for the average user, you have to be more technical in order to use it. There are other solutions that are better, with a GUI and easier to use.

If you are comfortable with a pure command line or if you are looking for something simpler where the entire thing could look up the monitoring, support, and cost, I think there are other brands with more features.

I would rate Juniper Ethernet Switches a seven out of ten.

We are solution providers. We offer many solutions to customers and the Juniper Ethernet Switches are part of our offering.

For switching, it's stable compared to others. 

The switching capacity is very high, and the virtual Chassis feature for stacking is good in general, with high bandwidth for the link, which is also good.

Recently, they are offering cloud-ready switches for the same series. When you have decided to go for the cloud, there are switches that are ready for that.

The management platforms for the network need improvement.

The pricing for support needs to be reduced, and the lead time for the switches should be lower.

They may already be working on this but I would like to see improvements with visibility, analysis of the traffic, and similar features. When you compare with other manufacturers, they have to work in these areas more.

I have been using these switches since 2014, it's been for six years.

We offer the latest technology but sometimes from three to five years, and we are offering refreshment, and whatever has been announced by the industry.

These switches are stable.

It is easy to scale. They have a stacking feature so you can scale up, for certain series, up to 12 switches per rack. Also, in terms of distribution or core switches, they have modular devices so they can add cards and modules to scale up.

I have not contacted technical support directly. We have a different team who handle the technical requirements.

Because we are solution providers, we use many different versions.

The initial setup is somewhat straightforward.

The time it takes for deployment depends on the site by the situation, the customer requirements, and the size of the network. Normally, it doesn't take very long.

When you compare with others, it's almost the same thing.

The pricing for the support is very high.

I would recommend these switches, but what I would also highly recommend along with this new trend or new experience is to at least get training for Juniper configuration, at least the basics.

Training will help you be more familiar with it. You will at least have the basics in case of maintenance or troubleshooting.

Juniper has good documentation for its ethernet switches.

I would rate Juniper switches a seven out of ten.

A lot of our deployments are hybrid cloud that we do for clients. We are personally using an on-premises installation.  

Our clients' use cases for Juniper Ethernet Switches are pretty broad as far as the industries covered. There are clients that are urgent care facilities, physician's offices, legal offices, restaurants — it really runs across the boards as far as industries. The USDA has a number of Juniper switches that we put in for them.  

When you are doing switching for anybody — it could be Motorola or Sprint or a restaurant that is relatively small and has 45 employees — it does not matter. They all have the same PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance needs. If they are in the medical industry in urgent care — like Duke Medical System or just a freestanding office — they all still have the same HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance. When we are configuring switches, we are not only looking at port density in terms of the number of devices that are hooking to it. We are also looking at the VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) configurations and a number of other things. Whether you are dealing with multilink, VLANs, being able to specifically control certain ports, control certain applications, or whatever, you are using almost every feature to some degree on every switch because the utility is valuable.  

One of the nicest things about Juniper switches is they work well with other vendor products. When you have to go into a situation where other vendor switches are present, you can make it work.  

Whether you are a Fortune 500 company or a small operation, you might have the same requirements for security features. There are security features related to Mac addresses that are present and high-end switches that lack some of the same flexibility in the lower-end switches. We may be talking about the difference between an EX2300 and an EX5500 model switch. It is the same manufacturer. It would be nice to have more of that security relevance in every level switch, regardless of the price tag or the model. It is just like the fact that you have the VLAN capability on all of them. I think the security features should generally be more available instead of scaled up and down with the product.  

Going into the future, you will probably see more fully meshed networks that have multiple internet-facing routes. These should go in an SD-WAN on a fiber-based VLAN. You may have coax services like Spectrum or Cox Cable providing internet avenues. Or you may also have a 4G or 5G modem doing the same thing in providing additional connection avenues. In the end, I think that the switching on that type of architecture and the routing needs to get a little more intuitive.  

Obviously, you can take care of the situation with routing tables and other methods. I think we are going to need to start seeing some kind of AI to assist with some of what we really want to accomplish from a policy standpoint to achieve better efficiency.  

I have been using Juniper switches for probably a little over 15 years.  

I love the stability of Juniper. I look for stability in this type of product. When I have to put my hands on something repeatedly because of problems — endemic or quasi failures, where the OS just kind of locks up and stops performing — I call them insanity failures. I rarely see that in Juniper or WatchGuard or any of those guys. I like that and that is why I lean toward using those products.  

Is there an end to the ability to scale Juniper? If there is, I have never seen it and I would know because I do data center design. Before I did what I am doing now, I was a director of new technology for Sprint PCS. We equipped to handle a lot of routing and I do not know if there is a scalability issue in the end.  

Our clients are a mix of industries that are small, medium, or large businesses. This product can service all of them. The scalability is really very good. 

You always end up using technical support here and there for something. I would give them a pretty high rating. Some of that technical support I reached out for has been in design implementation. I think once we did have a DOA (Dead On Arrival) switch. But things like that are rare and Juniper is very responsive. They are always pretty responsive. Overall it is a good company.  

I would give the technical support a nine. I do not know if there is any company that I know of whose technical support would rate as a ten-of-ten. I am saying they are a nine, but there really is nothing lacking compared to the competition.  

The installation of Juniper switches is pretty much straightforward.  

Juniper is less expensive than competing products and as much as 33% less than Cisco.  

Whether you are on the lower end of the business scale with a smaller portfolio, or whether you are a Fortune 500 or 1000 company, you can not go wrong with Juniper's back-end products. It is a cost-effective solution in comparison to the competition. I do not like to have to touch switches or routers or anything of that nature unless I am doing a new configuration or a firmware upgrade. The Juniper product helps me with that by having impeccable reliability.  

Saying that this solution is impeccable could be the entirety of my review.  

I have been a network architect for a long time. At one time in my career, I thought Nortel and Juniper were on par. They were the two best-engineered equipment supplier manufacturers out there from both a cost and performance standpoint. I had never been a big Cisco fan. The number one reason behind that is the per-port cost for Cisco is 30% higher than everybody else. Number two, they have too many proprietary protocols that are not friendly with what other technicians know. That is particularly true on their routers. I found that in practice, we had to reboot the Cisco products in enterprise and Fortune 500 company levels too many times. When you had 400 and 500 sites out there and you had to rebuild the routing tables, you were screwed. We did not ever have that same problem with Nortel or Juniper.  

So I got a bad taste in my mouth from Cisco many years ago. I spend a lot of time in cybersecurity and I find the Cisco IOS is one of the most vulnerable and most often patched by comparison to other high-end vendors, like Juniper. I have very few problems with Juniper products and they are easy to configure. They do a good job and they just continue doing it for a long time.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate this product as a ten overall for where they are in technology, their solid engineering, and the product. That includes the software and the hardware.  

Even the lack of a few features is not a point to knock them down to a nine because we are on a road where we are taking a trip. I do not care what the literature says, SD-WAN is still new. We are still pushing the envelope on how we want to use it and how we want to design our systems to work with it. I can not mark Juniper down for being on the cutting edge of innovation.  

We use the layer three switches. We use it for routing, separating the VLANs, and for inter-VLAN routing. Also, we use the product's firewall filters.  

It gives us another, better option for clients in switching technology.  

In general, and when I am talking about the Juniper SRX switches that have the Junos operating systems, I find that the admin features are very flexible. For example, the rollbacks or commit confirmed work very well. Fifty configurations can be saved and restored easily. These things are very good for us because it helps us to troubleshoot or to maintain the system. When we have remote access to a device, we can be sure that a process does not get disconnected.  

When you want to change a lot of parameters in a configuration, you make your changes and then you can initiate a commit and all the changes will be saved and will be enforced when the device is activated. These features are available in the Juniper switches with the Junos OS. They are very wonderful and powerful capabilities that are unique to the Juniper switching solution. For example, Cisco or FortiGate do not have similar features or they are not very good with these capabilities.  

To make the product better, I think that the company needs to do more testing before releasing versions of the operating system. In many versions, there are bugs in the Junos OS. For example, with some versions of the Junos OS, a specific function or some functions do not work correctly and you have to then change to another version to get the functionality back or make the product stable. Some versions of the Junos OS can create problems in integrations with Citrix and of course in other platforms because the OS has some bugs that cause instability. When you are using or when you find a stable OS, everything works okay. But I have had many experiences with some versions of Junos OS that have bugs and I am forced to migrate to another version of the OS either as an upgrade or even a downgrade. It will work in the end, but it should not be necessary to discover if an OS version is good or not.  

Something that I might like to see added to Juniper switches is the opportunity to use some NAT (Network Address Translation) features with it. I am not sure if it is possible or not. But having some NAT features would be nice and offer some other kinds of flexibility.  

We have been using Juniper Ethernet Switches for a little less than two years.  

I think for the most part it is a really a very stable product. When I use a stable Junos OS the stability is okay. Some of the OS versions are not so good because they have some bugs, and this can cause some issues with stability. But these are only temporary issues that are resolved by choosing which OS version to use and which to avoid. We have some devices on Juniper that have been running for more than one or even two years without any downtime. We have not had stability issues and we have not had to restart. It really demonstrates stability when you have examples where we have uptime of more than two years without any problems.  

I think Juniper is scalable in some ways. Really as far as this capability, I would say it is good, but that scalability is in the middle in the category of switches.  

The number of users who are using this solution is harder to estimate for our clients than it is within our own company. If we are talking about Juniper Ethernet, one client project that we have has between 200 or 250 people. Nearly 40% of the users are going to be systems engineers.  

There are a variety of user and organizational types. Some of the users are office workers and some of them are engineers. Some of them work in financial jobs and some of them are more on the business end. There are a variety of people using the products.  

I have not personally really had a reason to contact Juniper's technical support directly. There has been no need because most of the time — it is really 95% of the time — I can say our problems are easily solved by the knowledgebases or forums or by just changing the Junos OS.  

In our company, someone had to contact support because we had some problems with some of the licenses. In that case, we did get support to help us to fix the problem. It was not really a problem with the product, it was about the license only. I do not know about the technical support services directly but I do know the issue was resolved.  

In our location, there are not so many companies using Juniper Switches. The use of this brand is somewhat limited here because Juniper is not so popular and is unfortunately not as well-known as other product brands. Cisco switches are much more popular and I have used Cisco switches a lot — more than any other brand — for our clients. I also have experience with Tricom Switches and also with Extreme Networks switches and some experience with Fortinet solutions. We could use any of these depending on the client and the situation. As far as switching from one product to another, that is not exactly what we do. Because we are a reseller we have to have various solutions available, so we keep them all as opportunities for our clients as long as we have tested them and they are good solutions.  

When it came to Juniper, while we had other options, we were really interested in checking out the product and examining how the Juniper switches worked in comparison to the other more popular brands. Because our tests and experience with the product confirmed that it was a good option, we have tried to convince our customers to buy the Juniper solution because it is a good solution and works well even if it was not so popular. We somehow have convinced a few clients to agree to buy the Juniper Switches to this point. But even though we are promoting Juniper, most of the time our clients are gravitating to what they are familiar with and that means purchasing Cisco because they think that the Cisco solution is better just because of the name.  

Another reason that the clients would think the Cisco products were better for them is not only because they do not know the Juniper brand name. One of the other main reasons is that a technical people who have experience in working with Juniper devices are much more scarce than technical people who know how to configure Cisco switches. The product and the name might not be the problem but finding technicians who could work with the solution is the problem instead.  

The initial setup is not complex. It is usually easy. It depends. If you understand the concepts of working with the product — if you already have some experience with it — it is easy to work with it. But if you do not have the experience and do not get the concept, it might seem to be unfriendly. If you can work with it a little and get the concept of how it works and how you should configure it, then it becomes a really friendly format.  

I think it took about one week to configure and deploy the switches. Of course, sometimes we were not working just on that for a whole day, so the number of hours working just on that deployment is something I can not say exactly. But in about one week the deployment was complete. It could have been done faster if it were the only thing that we were concentrating on.  

Most of the time, I do the deployments by myself. But when I have some problems, we have a team that can help out. I might ask them, or I might use the knowledgebases on the internet or search on Google to find solutions. Most of the time there are good, long articles on Juniper's site or in one of the forums that can help me to resolve any issues. There is a lot of knowledge that is readily available. Juniper takes care to publish many good articles. 95% of the time, it is not really hard to solve a problem. If I just go and do a little searching, I can find the information I need to resolve any problem.  

The exact licensing is not something I know about, but I do know that Juniper is a less expensive solution when compared to the competition.  

Because of some limitations as in regulations or client business requirements, we can not always work with cloud solutions or solutions that run on VMs. There are some solutions I might like to consider, but for the most part, our market will not accept certain solutions. Often we have to work with on-premises hardware and that makes a difference in availability.  

We are continuing to evaluate other solutions in order to be able to meet our clients' needs. The regulations and perception of products may change over time. We use Juniper in our company because we think it is the better solution and we do not have restrictions.  

My advice to people who are considering using Juniper switches is to try them out because the Juniper brand is very good. I myself really like the Juniper devices because, in comparison to other products in this category, they are a very good value and are worth much more than the cost. These switches are much more stable and you have better performance than the other guys, so long as you are aware of the potential issues with the OS. I think I can say this in one sentence: you can have better performance at a lower price if you choose Juniper.  

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Juniper Ethernet switches — besides the fact that the most popular name is not always the best product or the best solution — is that using the commit confirmed feature instead of just committing is very valuable. It can help you to be sure your commit is successful. If it is not for whatever reason, the product deals with the issue. After a certain amount of time, the product can roll back automatically if something did not commit successfully. Not all products have anything like this feature.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Juniper Ethernet Switches as a nine overall. It is a nine and not a ten because there should always be room for product improvement.  

The tool should improve its fabric. 

I have been working with the product for four years. 

The tool's stability and performance are better than those of Cisco. 

The solution is scalable. It supports my five-year expansion plan. I could expand without a problem. 

I communicated with the product's support team directly. 

Positive

The main difference between Cisco and Juniper EX Series Ethernet Switches is their configuration commands. Juniper EX Series Ethernet Switches's commands are more realistic and offer a rollback option for committed commands. I prefer Juniper EX Series Ethernet Switches.

The solution's deployment is easy. 

The product is worth its money. 

The solution's pricing is cheaper than that of Cisco. 

I built the full project for one of our biggest logistics companies in Cairo. I think there were about 28 switches for the warehouses. I recommend the product for large technical projects. I rate it seven out of ten. 

The durability of the devices could be better. Some ports have broken because the data center efficiently cannot cool the system.

We have been using Juniper EX Series Ethernet Switches for two years.

We never encounter any critical issues related to the product’s stability.

We have 500 Juniper EX Series Ethernet Switches users in our projects. I rate its scalability an eight out of ten. It could be improved.

We switched to Juniper EX Series Ethernet Switches for pricing.

The product is flexible and easy to set up. We required three executives, including an L1 engineer, an L2 engineer, and a project manager, for the deployment.

It is an inexpensive product.

We are evaluating Cisco and Aruba products.

The product has good performance. Its AI features help us with configurations.

I rate it an eight out of ten.