[bogomipz]

>"One huge secret about Juniper devices is that the hardware is remarkably unreliable."

This is patently untrue. The MTTF is the same as Cisco gear. The only reason this would be a "huge secret" is because it is not widely held opinion.

There are bad revision of chipsets on certain boards from time to time yes. And if you place a large order you will likely feel that pain if you're shipped boards with those revs. I know this first hand and with SRXs. Firewalls are but one segment of their product line and the one that was never their core strength(in fact this was the Netscreen acquisition.)

The T4000 and MX 960s are both "big iron" and in both the core and edge of Tier 1 ISPs. The reputation of these are exceptional and for good reason. Their EX/QFX ToR switches also have a well-deserved reputation.

To use your anecdotal experience with on particular segment of their product line and make a sweeping generalization of the quality of their entire offering is absurd.

I say this as someone who doesn't have a horse in the race and has very little love for network hardware vendors in general.

[stephengillie]

MX series routers do seem more reliable than their SRX counterparts. It's just frustrating to go into a major incident retrospective and hear that - yet again - we're not redundant in a data center because we rebooted a Juniper device and now it needs an RMA.

Juniper even instructed us to reboot the passive node before any failover, just to catch these issues.