Generally speaking, I really like working with the SRX. We use 210, 220, and 240 models throughout the company. It's trivially easy to set up tunnels with OSPF to do all kinds of neat inter-office connectivity, and working with JTAC is WAY better than Cisco TAC. (we have a Cisco phone system)
Five years ago, we bought 15 new SRXes from an authorized Juniper dealer, and each was installed in a separate geographic location.
I'm having GRAVE concerns about their reliability. In the past 2 years, 5 of the 15 have failed with a 6th one heading to the toilet.
- One lost its flash-- no storage recognized at boot. It will only boot from a USB stick.
- Another suddenly came up with a huge number of flash errors, enough that we had to remove from service-- and this one's in a very high quality colo facility (clean power always).
- One has a "reset" button problem, such that it kept resetting itself to factory defaults randomly. I had to set "config-button no-clear" as a workaround.
- One randomly lost power internally several times a day... not an OS crash, but as in "all the lights blink off then back on". (Power supply swap didn't help.)
- One slowly lost its RJ-45 interfaces, one at a time. I moved services to other interfaces as they failed, until one day...... the unit just crashed and never rebooted.
- Another one is starting the "randomly loses power internally" issue, in the exact same way as the other one did. I'm configuring its replacement today.
6 failures out of 15... that's a 40% failure rate in 5 years. For the record, all are on APC UPSes of varying capacities, and utility power problems are extremely rare.
Is the SRX really this much of a failure-prone dog? Juniper Netscreens we bought circa 2005-06 are still running TODAY with no problems at all... which is why I was so anxious to adopt the SRX at new locations. But wow.... the problems never end.
Are we alone in this experience?