from Hacker News

Juniper Networks to Combine with HPE

by awat on 1/9/24, 11:38 PM with 123 comments

• by AlbertCory on 1/10/24, 3:27 AM

  Read: "Bill & Dave" by Michael Malone.

  Agilent took the heart & soul of HP. Then it split further (Keysight et al)

  HP took the printers, which at least used to be a good business.

  HPE is the wretched refuse that's left.

• by jgalt212 on 1/10/24, 3:36 AM

  > Accelerating AI-Native Networking Leadership

  I think I just threw up in my mouth.

• by shrubble on 1/10/24, 2:56 AM

  It's sad, HPE will suck out all the life-force of Juniper; I have had other HP-acquired products and they never got better in subsequent offerings, only worse.

• by user3939382 on 1/10/24, 4:00 AM

  Great let’s just have 2 vendors in every industry in the world with a combined 90% market share.

• by _cormorant on 1/10/24, 5:07 AM

  I work in a primarily Juniper environment, and I'm not that familiar with HPE (Did they previously have anything in the networking space?). It's sounding pretty doom-and-gloom in here, what should my level of concern be?

  I would be pretty bummed to change vendor. Junos is probably my favorite networking OS. The CLI is comfortable, BSD is never too far away, and the config structure is gorgeous. IOS (and similar) can really be a pain to read by comparison.

• by meerinor on 1/10/24, 6:10 AM

  Juniper has no cohesion in their product offering, so fits well with HPE who also fail in this regard. They had all the pieces, ex/qfx/srx/128t/mist/aapstra/mx/ptx to build any network you needed, but no ability to fully integrate all of the things. Surprising that HPE acquires them considering they already competitors across half of those things procurve/silverpeak/aruba/plexxi.

• by pavelstoev on 1/10/24, 3:13 AM

  Happy Juniper customer since 2010. Across SRX, EX, QFX lines. What to do now, what to do...

• by oldnetguy on 1/10/24, 2:50 AM

  Another one bites the dust

• by rasz on 1/10/24, 7:58 AM

  Im getting nineties Nortel Bay Networks all stock flashbacks.

  The Company that Broke Canada - BobbyBroccoli https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6xwMIUPHss

• by m01 on 1/10/24, 8:05 AM

  They already acquired Aruba in 2015 (https://investors.hpe.com/financial/acquisitions)...

• by wcchandler on 1/10/24, 2:23 PM

  I was always a fan of HP and 3com for networking over Cisco. It was easy to keep gear assigned to specific tasks. This is our core switch. This is the core router. Pricing kept this amenable to management. Juniper was never "in the budget" as a viable alternative. I'm currently at a Cisco shop that purchased their first Juniper switch 12 months ago for Equinix cross-connects to the cloud. Should be interesting to see how this plays out.

• by mooreds on 1/10/24, 2:22 PM

  From the press release[0]:

  "The combination is expected to achieve operating efficiencies and run-rate annual cost synergies of $450 million within 36 months post close."

  Not that such layoffs are unexpected.

  0: https://newsroom.juniper.net/news/news-details/2024/HPE-to-A...

• by yalogin on 1/10/24, 3:56 AM

  HPE is in the same boat as Juniper in terms of market and mindshare. I guess they want to see what it looks like to merge I guess

• by jasoneckert on 1/10/24, 3:33 AM

  I remember working with Juniper equipment a decade ago (I didn't like it because I've traditionally worked exclusively with Cisco equipment), but I haven't heard anyone in my circles mention Juniper since. Are they considered a niche vendor today (similar to Novell in the 2000s)?

• by green-salt on 1/10/24, 6:01 AM

  Ahhhh this explains why they (Juniper) have been a nightmare to deal with lately.

• by nodesocket on 1/10/24, 7:26 AM

  Any good leads on some “cheap” Juniper 10Gbps switches?

• by sciencesama on 1/10/24, 6:36 AM

  and now juniper will perish !!

• by whalesalad on 1/10/24, 2:30 AM

  the enshittifcation and conglomeration of all things continues.

• by FL410 on 1/10/24, 3:14 PM

  This has the potential to be good. HPE has mostly let the (superior) Aruba line grow as they were, and TBH the CX stuff is quite good. They don't have any enterprise class routing/firewalls. Their AP hardware is great but Central can be frustrating. If they can put the pieces together without fucking things up, there's a good product line up here at a time when people are sick and tired of Cisco's licensing antics. TBD...

• by bluedino on 1/10/24, 5:48 PM

  HPE took over Aruba wireless and Nimble storage. We used both products. They didn't fuck with Nimble support much. As of a few years ago, it was still great.

  Aruba wireless...oh man. The support was so terrible.

  We had some high availability controllers go out of sync. Couple hours on the phone, no resolution. Had a bunch of back and forth, another couple calls, nothing. It was sort of funny (and sad) watching a different 'tech' try the same scripted steps, over and over again.

  Finally I was able to get the issue escalated, and the next guy I talked to seemed to really know his shit. Made some fundamental changes that should have never been that way in the first place, he got one controller back on, and then in the middle the next controller, he fucking bailed off the call and left us in the hands of a new guy.

  A new guy who couldn't fix it. He actually broke it in a new away, and then our maintenance window closed. Two more maintenance windows later, nothing fixed, same useless drones trying the same crap, I just gave up.

  I ended up fixing the last bad controller myself. My organization was paying almost my salary per year for this 'support' contract. What a joke.