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Juniper EX Series Switches

Score9.4 out of 10

39 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Juniper EX Series Switches?

Juniper Networks offers the EX Series Ethernet switches, as cloud-grade switches designed for the converged enterprise branch, campus, and data center, and for service providers. They address growing enterprise demands for high availability, unified communications, and virtualization.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Juniper EX Series Switches has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 39 ratings of Juniper EX Series Switches's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Link Aggregation (LACP)

    Allows users to combine Ethernet links, resulting in more bandwidth, better load balancing, and redundancy.

    Category average: 8.5

  • Switch Scalability

    Ability to add new switches to the network (possibly through stacking) to enable more bandwidth.

    Category average: 8.4

  • Management Interface

    The Interface allows for configuration and monitoring of the devices on your network.

    Category average: 8.4

Areas for Improvement

  • Switch Redundancy

    The switch follows a redundancy protocol, such as the parallel redundancy protocol (PRP) or high-availability seamless redundancy (HSR) to ensure network performance in the event of a device or power failure.

    Category average: 8.5

  • Quality of Service (QoS)

    Enables the prioritization of traffic to ensure network performance.

    Category average: 8.4

Reviews

What users are saying about Juniper EX Series Switches.
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Juniper EX Series Switches

Caleb WhortonView profile
Technology Director in Information Technology at Coosa County Schools (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

When I arrived at my current job 3.5 years ago, my predecessor had purchased every brand of switch imaginable. It was difficult to manage with a different platform for each switch. When I was searching for a brand to commit to, I listened to demos on Juniper EX Series Switches and started down that route. Now I've replaced 90% of our switches with the Juniper EX Series Switches (4100's to be exact - 24 and 48 port) and am able to centrally manage them all.

Pros

  • Central Management
  • Updates
  • Reliability
  • Ease of use

Cons

  • There are no features I've worked with on other switches that Juniper EX Series Switches don't have and wish they did.

Return on Investment

  • Positive - I spend virtually no time tracking down equipment. With these switches I can easily hover over the port number and it will tell me what type of device is plugged into it and even has images for quickly determining which ports have cameras plugged in for instance
  • Positive - They are reasonably priced and a solid investment. They are in the middle of the pricing spectrum.
  • Positive - No outages. I've been using them for around two years now and haven't had an outage that took more than a few minutes to diagnose and resolve

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Extreme AP560 Series, HPE Aruba Networking Switches, Cisco 350X Series Stackable Managed Switches and RUCKUS Ethernet Switches

Other Software Used

Juniper Mist Wired Assurance, Juniper Mist Wi-Fi Assurance, Fortinet FortiGate

Juniper EX as an alternative for Cisco Catalyst

Incentivized
Diego CarmignaniView profile
IT Infrastructure Coordinator in Information Technology at Cartiere Carrara S.p.A. (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Juniper EX as access switches. In the past we used Cisco catalyst and HP but we needed a unique solution with carrier class grade without spend a lot of money. Juniper EX introduced also L3 features and Virtual Chassis solve multiple IPs that we need to manage

Pros

  • Stack - Virtual chassis
  • Commit feature
  • Strong OS

Cons

  • Upgrading OS requires 10-12 mins of downtime
  • OS boot is slow (around 7mins)
  • Switch off/on requires a commit

Return on Investment

  • Bought EX2200 in 2016 and we dismissed them after 8 years without issue to new models (just replacing switch)
  • They are bigger than other brands like HPe so we replaced some racks

Usability

Alternatives Considered

HPE Aruba Ethernet Switches and Cisco Catalyst Switches

Other Software Used

Juniper Mist Wired Assurance, Zabbix, Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points

Great product and cloud platform.

Incentivized
Jonathan BradshawView profile
Network Engineer in Information Technology at Safariland (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We deploy these to multiple sites across the world. We don’t have IT resources in every location so we need these to work when they arrive. They are preconfigured and sent over to the site. We then have a resource connect it to the network on management and configure our ports at that time.

Pros

  • Cloud platform easy to use
  • Intuitive port mapping to make identifying devices easy
  • Easy config updating
  • Templates for multiple deployments

Cons

  • Updating the cloud after changes pushed
  • Management port config gets stuck with bad gateway

Return on Investment

  • Easy management at multiple locations.
  • Since the merger, product has been difficult to get

Usability

Alternatives Considered

HPE Aruba Networking Switches

Other Software Used

FortiAnalyzer, Fortinet FortiGate

Juniper EX switches - connectivity the way it should be.

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Juniper EX switches are used to all access switching needs and connectivity between campuses. The product addresses our needs for an easy to manage networking platform. Various models from the portfolio are used in order to meet the needs of different buildings and projects.

We use them in conjunction with MIST the platform for management and assurance of the network.

Pros

  • Switching and routing
  • Redudancy
  • Configuration resiliency
  • Software maturity

Cons

  • Better storage management for logs
  • More fanless options

Return on Investment

  • Less time spent managing configuraitions
  • More uptime

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points, Cisco Meraki MS, Ubiquiti Networks UniFi and HPE Aruba Networking Switches

Juniper EX Series Switches

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Juniper EX Series Switches for all switching needs. We use it for access layer switching, core network, and top of rack in the server room. We leverage PoE and MGig for access layer. We use fiber SFPs on the core. We have moved away from every desk having a hard line in exchange for a denser Wi-Fi coverage. The combined use of Juniper Wi-Fi and Juniper switching grants a whole lot of power to the Mist portal.

Pros

  • Switch Administration in Mist
  • Virtual Stacks
  • Config management

Cons

  • Config parity in CLI and Mist
  • Loud fan noise, especially at startup.
  • Better integration with ServiceNow

Return on Investment

  • Price of Juniper for the performance is much better than the other leading vendor.
  • I have had minimal problems which frees me to focus on other areas.
  • Mist is intuitive and comes with free training. My Junior network admins were able to get up to speed quickly.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Cisco Catalyst Switches and Arista Campus Switches

Other Software Used

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), Infoblox DDI (BloxOne), HPE Juniper Access Points