Juniper’s latest additions to its routing and switching line address many of the common performance and security issues faced by midmarket businesses and distributed enterprises.Juniper Networks introduced a new series of high-performance networking solutions that are designed to lower costs for solution providers and their midmarket and distributed enterprise customers, and to optimize switching, routing and security.
At the heart of Juniper’s new offerings is its JUNOS network operating system, which allows the new products to easily integrate with legacy Juniper products and be integrated into data centers as if they were a single device, says Mike Banik, vice president for Juniper’s Ethernet Platforms Business Group.
“JUNOS is our major competitive differentiator,” says Alex Gray, vice president and general manager for Juniper’s Branch Business Group. JUNOS means solution providers only have one OS and one network management solution across their entire Juniper deployment, he says.
“Most distributed enterprises have a conga line of different boxes—routers, firewalls, switches, gateways, IP boxes, VOIP boxes that all use different operating systems and different software versions,” he says. “But because of JUNOS and the distributed architecture we introduced last fall, we can collapse all of this into one simple platform,” Gray says.
Juniper’s new EX2200 switches incorporate the same enterprise-class switching capabilities, but at a lower cost, aimed at midmarket customers and branches and satellite offices of large, distributed enterprises, says Gray. These customers face very specific challenges and solution providers often struggle to meet those needs, he says.
“With mobile workers, locations and branch offices, distributed enterprises often have problems with security, performance and manageability,” he says.
The new EX2200 switches enable solution providers to deliver secure, consistent access across all of an enterprise’s sites, he says, and an integrated "support engineer in a box" feature can help solution providers offer faster, simpler end-user support, Gray says.
“This support engineer in the box will be applicable for all JUNOS devices,” he says. “We’ve integrated support scripts that automate solution providers’ troubleshooting, and an Advanced Insight Manager customizes which support functions are automated, so solution providers can decide how much high-touch support they want to provide,” says Gray.
Along with the EX220 switches, Juniper has also introduced new SRX series gateways. The SRX650, 240, 210 and 100 models offer many of the same operations, capabilities and features as their enterprise-class siblings, but Juniper has scaled down features such as the number of I/O slots and LAN and WAN ports, voice gateway options and performance to better fit the needs of midmarket and branch office customers, Gray says.
The SRX series rounds out Juniper’s routing portfolio, Gray says, and with prices ranging from $699 for the SRX100 all the way to the $16,000 SRX 650, customers of any size can find a solution and a price point that’s right for them.
In addition, the SRX line now includes support for unified communications and VOIP, though Gray is quick to note that Juniper’s not trying to overreach.
“We’re not getting into telephony like some of our major competitors, don’t get me wrong,” he says. “But we do realize we need to make sure we can incorporate SIP and other telephony technologies to provide a comprehensive solution for customers,” he says.
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