Category: Juniper

Juniper Networks and Dell have signed a deal that will see the pair collaborate to offer combined networking solutions.

Under the agreement, networking products from Juniper will be offered under Dell’s PowerConnect brand. The pair state that this move will allow customers to deploy a common network management platform and network operating system to help them reduce operating expenses.

The deal also includes plans to work together on open, standards-based solutions for virtualised data centres and to create technology solutions using Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE). This is intended to improve network economics.

“Networking is an important piece in providing customers with choices for how they optimise their data center operations to improve efficiency,” said Brad Anderson, senior vice president of the Enterprise Product Group at Dell.

“This agreement will help address many of our customer’s biggest challenges including a dramatic rise in security concerns, an increasingly dispersed workforce and challenges brought on with the advent of the virtualised data centre,” added Anderson.

From Juniper’s perspective, the partnership with hardware vendor Dell underlines its strategic concentration on the enterprise networking market.

This OEM agreement is another great step in our sustained and successful push into the enterprise market,” said Gerri Elliott, executive vice president, strategic alliances at Juniper Networks.

“We have the only infrastructure that includes integrated security, routing and switching running on a single operating system. And that uniform approach is a great benefit to IT organisations, from the smallest to the largest, as they tackle the challenges of an increasingly decentralised landscape,” added Elliot.

Juniper Networks has announced a major set of new solutions and partnerships which it says will “reinvent the experience and economics of networking”.

The new releases include new processors, new Junos software, new solutions for cloud networking and security, and strategic partnerships

Kevin Johnson, CEO of Juniper said: “Networks are now clearly the hub of business and community around the world, and that’s driving massive scale requirements for the next decade. Driven by our mission to connect everything and empower everyone, Juniper believes it’s time for a new approach to networking. An approach based on smart systems and open software platforms. An approach that adapts to changing business dynamics. An approach that embraces partnership and unleashes innovation.”

The new Junos software platform has been created to allow customers to directly program multiple layers of their networks. The platform includes the Junos network operating system, and the new Junos Space network application platform and Junos Pulse integrated network client.

In the processor field, Juniper announced a new Junos One family of processors, including the Junos Trio chipset with 3D Scaling technology that enables networks to dynamically support more subscribers, services and bandwidth. The Junos Trio will be delivered in new modular line cards and new 3.5-inch routers for Juniper MX Series, which the company says will provide up to 2.6 terabits per second of throughput, making them up to four times faster than the competition, while only using half as much power per gigabit.

There has been a great deal of announcements from Juniper regarding its strategy and product ranges in the last few months. How big is this time in terms of milestones for the company?

I would say this is probably after the founding of the company 12 years ago this is the biggest announcement ever since.

And it is a reactive move perhaps to the call, globally, for cloud computing to become a stronger part of the overall business and networking provisions today…

Yes, we believe that networks overall are changing, it is about access and about the user experience and it is about overall virtualisation of everything for enterprises. We don’t believe that it is scalable for business to continue to build their dedicated data centres and this is why we believe that on the whole virtualisation is going to be very important and this is why we call it cloud networking rather than cloud computing. I think it is much bigger than just the computing part.

And you claim you can really save money for the end-user in both CAPEX and in OPEX. This is a claim though, that many vendors have been making as it is obviously what the end-user wants to hear right now. So why and how is your claim different? Is it down to the flexibility of the cloud?

It is that element for sure, because you start to share resources, applications and application providers in their shared space and you don’t need all of the IT resources for assistance and maintenance.

And the other thing that I really believe is important is — how are you going to scale this massive ramp-up? We have shown you what happened with all the devices that there are now, it will break, if a company and search providers are not starting to think more strategically about the future, it will break. It is not for us, just announcing one product, it is about software, it is about network architecture, and scalability. It is also about how to do things differently than we have done before.

This is also you laying down the gauntlet to Cisco as it faces increasing competition from all sides. How will your ‘New Network’ strategy help you challenge Cisco here on a local basis?

In most of the markets we have become either the number one or the number two player. That is definitely one of the things, we have been very successful in competing with them in the high performance routing space, enterprise space and service provider’s space.

And Juniper has been very successful and taking second place in the security networking space and we are starting to move very aggressively with security in the pipeline. The good thing is we are not competing in the same space as IBM, Sun or Oracle, nor HP in a way, and if you look at Cisco they are really narrow, sort of fighting with their traditional rivals.

We stay, a pure play networking and security company, which provides Juniper a huge opportunity in the market and this is also why you have seen the OEM announcement with Dell and also with IBM, in which they are really working with Juniper.

Is the Middle East really ready for cloud computing on this scale that you have announced, because in many enterprises in this region are still looking at the consolidation of their infrastructure and are they really ready to move a lot of it into the cloud?

The good thing is that it is not an architecture that is out there over nothing. What we do is we provide a real gradual approach to it, you can start with our switching products and then you can expand to the infrastructure at their own pace. I think today all enterprises and service providers are suffering from the same challenges. One is the power supply, the space and physicality of how to manage it and how to introduce new applications and bring the total cost of ownership down for their customers.

Juniper Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: JNPR), the leader in high-performance networking, today announced that the Ministry of Culture and Information, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s agency responsible for state broadcasting, printing and information services, has built a new high-performance network for voice, video and data using an end-to-end integrated infrastructure solution from Juniper Networks.

The Juniper solution includes switching, routing and security technologies, and has been designed to provide a fast, reliable, secure infrastructure for the ministry’s mission-critical network traffic and applications while reducing total cost of ownership.

“Rather than upgrade our existing network, we decided to migrate to a more flexible IP network with Juniper that would deliver 55% faster performance and security while lowering operating costs by 35%,” said Dr. Abdulaziz Almulhem, chief information and strategy officer, Ministry of Culture and Information. “Juniper’s best-in-class network infrastructure solutions deliver the high levels of throughput, reliability and quality of service that we require for our sensitive and bandwidth-hungry applications.”

The Ministry of Culture and Information is responsible for all information services in Saudi Arabia, including television broadcasting, radio broadcasting, publication of printed material and foreign press relations. Information and news is provided to the public through the Ministry’s network of radio and television broadcasting stations, and through the publication and distribution of books and other material. The Ministry of Culture and Information has 38 local publication offices, eight centers for local information and seven centers for foreign information.

The Ministry of Culture and Information has deployed Juniper Networks EX Series Ethernet Switches and M Series Multiservice Edge Routers in its corporate backbone network. By deploying a switching and routing solution that leverages JUNOS® Software — a single source operating system integrating routing, switching, security and network services from Juniper — the Ministry can streamline network operations and improve the availability, performance and security of business applications. A commissioned study has estimated costs savings of using JUNOS Software to be as much as 41 percent.

The Juniper Networks SA Series SSL VPN Appliances provide market-leading, browser-based SSL VPN security capabilities to serve the Ministry’s remote access needs with best-in class endpoint security, granular access control, and scalability. The SA Series works with the Juniper Networks IDP Series Intrusion Detection and Prevention Appliances to automatically block malicious traffic coming from outside the network, with the Juniper Networks ISG Series Integrated Security Gateway delivering scalable network and application security.

Additional security technology implemented includes Juniper Networks NetScreen Series Security Systems with integrated firewall, VPN and traffic management functionality, Denial of Service and Distributed Denial of Service protection at scale to secure the core implementations within The Ministry of Information and Culture’s network; and the Juniper Networks WXC Series Application Acceleration Platform, a WAN optimization solution that helps maximize WAN investments and improve application response times for the Ministry’s branch offices.

“Organizations now demand more from their networks, in terms of simplicity, performance and value for money,” said Gert-Jan Schenk, senior vice president of operations EMEA, Juniper Networks. “Juniper Networks high-performance infrastructure solutions help The Ministry of Culture and Information to create an innovative and operationally efficient environment that helps to reduce costs and raise productivity without compromise.”