JUNOS Enterprise Switching

Preface

It wasn’t but a day or so after we finished JUNOS Enterprise Routing, the companion book to this one, that our editor started pressuring us to start writing again. Writing a book may seem easy on the surface; how hard could it have been to write some words on these pages? But in reality, writing a book is a time-consuming and collaborative effort that affects everyone close to you. Also, at the time of the request, the EX Series was a new product line, and although we had extensive experience in the switching space, we did not have many customer deployments of the EX Series switches.

We were really impressed when the first EX units arrived for us to put in the rack that we reserved for this book. As JUNOS “experts,” we expected a lot, and we were impressed at the ease of configuration and stability that the JUNOS software provided to the EX. Although the performance and configuration of the EX switches are slightly different from those of a JUNOS router, the EX platform fit our needs, and hopefully it will fit yours, too.

The world of Ethernet switching changed when Juniper Networks got involved. At the time of this writing, the EX Series switches are already making significant inroads into the enterprise marketplace.

In this book, we have extended the same approach and writing style we used in JUNOS Enterprise Routing so that you, the reader, can have a set of books that work together. We did not write these books with the idea that you’d read one before the other, so some ...