Juniper Preps ‘New Network, Ready For The Cloud’

Juniper Networks is looking to network requirements for the next ten years after announcing its ‘new network’ initiative, that includes new processors and routers, and a revamp of its network operating system.

The initiative will be officially launched at the New York Stock Exchange later today, and includes a new logo and brand identity intended to reflect the company’s expanded portfolio.

“Juniper has always a pure play networking company that partners,” said Paul Gainham, director of service provider marketing (EMEA), speaking to eWEEK Europe. “We are now adding extensive value to that proposition.”

“We have a founding excellence around three pillars, namely silicon, software design and systems architecture,” he said. “The announcements today are enhancing those areas, as the new network addresses the need for a connected culture.”

There are three challenges ahead facing both enterprises and services providers,” Gainham explained. “The first centres around the challenge of scale, as the sheer capacity of traffic that networks are being asked to handle is growing massively, and we think it will only continue to grow.”

“The second challenge is the expertise of the network,” he said. “With the connected culture, the challenge the network is to deliver richer and richer experience, whether you are connecting from a mobile handsets, television, laptop or smart phone. The network needs the intelligence to know where you are and how to deliver content to you. Another challenge here is to do that (deliver content) securely, wherever you are.”

“The third challenge centres around economics,” he said. “There is no real surprise here, as networks nowadays have to do more with less. Every customer we talk to are asking us to take the complexity out of network, simplfy it, and do more with less. The economics are driving the cost out of the network.”

To this end the company has unveiled a number of announcements, including new products (routers and chips), new software and new partnership deals:

• New JUNOS software that includes the revamped JUNOS network operating system, a new network application suite called JUNOS Space, and a new integrated client called JUNOS Pulse.
• New silicon, including the JUNOS One line of processors and JUNOS Trio chipset with “3D Scaling” technology. According to Gainham, 3D Scaling enables networks to simultaneously support more subscribers, services and bandwidth.
• Catering for the cloud as well security in the virtualised environment with products based on the new JUNOS software platform. This includes enhancements to Juniper’s SRX Services Gateway, as well as implementation guides, best practices and modules for building a ‘Cloud Ready Data Centre.’
• Partnerships. It has expanded relationships with Dell and IBM. Juniper also announced its first-ever JUNOS software licensing partnership with BLADE Network Technologies, which will develop future blade switches for data centres based on the JUNOS operating system.