Juniper Networks recently announced a slew of new software, silicon & systems, solutions, partnerships and branding which take it to a new level to address network congestion issues.

The explosive growth in Internet capacity, total digitised information, the number of Google searches per month and the number of connected devices has ramped up dramatically since 2003 and this has let to very congested networks and the company expects to see more interactive video content online, according to its Malaysia country manager, Wan Mohd. Kamal Wan Halim.

The years 2010 to 2012 will see an increasingly connected culture, not only in terms of a proliferation of handheld devices, social networking, increased content consumption on them but also machine-to-machine communications and Juniper tries to address these services, including mobile TV, and these will place demands on enterprise IT, network service providers.

The new new network demands require new economics in terms of reduced total cost of ownership through minimised operating system, converged networks, integrated services and reduced power & space; revenue growth through service richness, open innovation and customer retention; and accelerated profitability through increased value, differentiated offerings and faster time-to-market.

There will be an increased shift to cloud computing, driving change and the cloud will provide connectivity between enterprises, consumers and the data centre.

Juniper's latest tag line is “Connect everything, empower everyone,” based on its belief that the network must become and open, flexible, high-performance network powered and constantly improved by software, with thousands committed to the use of Juniper's Junos network equipment operating system and in turn empower billions of consumers, where consumers who want more bandwidth are willing to pay more for it.

Junos has so far been available as a Juniper network equipment operating system (OS) based on open industry standards.

Juniper had opened up the Junos Software Development Kit (SDK) in 2007 and has over 40 partners to date. Development partners include its customers, OEM partners, independent software vendors and systems integrators and universities, which have developed applications applications such as signalling protocols, intelligent agents, providers of broadband services, encryption, tunnelling, inspection, enhanced video-on-demand, IP TV and video conferencing.

Building upon this success of Open Junos, Juniper has expanded this SDK into an open, cross-network platform which includes the Junos OS plus the Junos Space network application platform and the Junos Pulse unified network client and its 40 partners automatically become partners in Junos Space and Junos Pulse.

These include big names such as Active Broadband Networks, Ankeena Networks, Siemens, Packet Design, Q1 Labs, NEC, NTT Communications, Harris Startex, Polycom, Lockheed Martin, Jamcrasher, Telecom Italia, Telchemy, Triveni Digital and others.

Junos Space is a network application layer which runs on top of the Junos OS and opens up opportunities for third-party application developers to create innovative cross-network applications which run on top of Junos, whilst Junos Space is a user application layer which talks to Junos Space and runs on the network client for specific applications such  banking, security and others.

Juniper targets four Junos Space application developments in the first quarter of 2010, five in the second quarter, six in the third and eight in the fourth. These will be the areas of infrastructure, business, productivity and collaboration.

One example is Ethernet Activator, capable of provisioning 200 virtual private networks per operator hour which is 10 times faster than at present, whilst requiring 30 minutes per setup or one thousandth the time to revenue compared to previously.

Junos Pulse runs on Juniper equipment in remote locations such as branch offices and includes a dashboard which lets administrators dynamically provision the network for WAN acceleration, security, dynamic anti-malware protection, automatic path remediation. location aware secure user connectivity, secure access and unified access control.

Together, these are expected to let customers directly program multiple layers of their network for a rich user experience, smart economics and a faster time to market.

Silicon and systems

The second key announcement is Juniper's new Junos-based silicon and systems, comprising a mew Junos One family for processors, including the Junos Trio chipset with 3D Scaling technology which allows networks to dynamically support more subscribers, services and bandwidth all at once.

“Normally, when operators increase one of these factors in their networking equipment but at the expense of the others which degrade but with Junos Trio , all three factors can be optimised,” said Wan Kamal.

“At 240 Gb/s line card capacity, Junos Trio over twice as fast as the 100 Gb/s of the competitor's highest capacity today. With 1.5 billion packets/second, its twice as fast as the 800 million packets per second of the competition. At 8 millions address per second versus the competitions three million addresses per second it has three times the addressing speed and at 37 watts per 10 Gigabit Ethernet, it has twice the power efficiency of the 75 watts per 10 GE of the competition,” he added.

JunosTrio will be delivered in new modular line cards and new 3.5 inch routers for the Juniper MX Series, which Juniper claims to provide two to four times faster throughput than its competition – with speeds up to 2.6 terabytes per second whilst using half as much power per gigabit. The MX 3D products will odder what it calls “the world's first universal edge,” with 3D scaling for business, residential and mobile services at massive scale on a single network.

Trio hardware includes the MX-3D line cards for edge and aggregation services, whilst the MX80 routers are for metro Carrier Ethernet and mobile videos and Trio's benefits include dynamic control across bandwidth, subscriber numbers and services, and unlimited applications across residential, business and mobile.

Aimed at the highest growth segment, the MX 80 router has 80 Gb/s capacity, is modular with two slots, SyncE, 1588 and fixed 48x 10/100/1000 Mb/s. It features hierarchical queuing, investment protection, a Layer 2 and Multi-Protocol Label Switching control plane and other Junos features.

The MS 3D line cares for edge aggregation feature hierarchical queuing, port, virtual LAN, twice the number of queues per card than the competition, complies with IEEE standards for line rate performance, video, voice and universal content and supports subscriber edge, business edge, mobile edge, Carrier Ethernet aggregation, video distribution networks, data centre and core aggregation.

Third parties have verified that increased time-to-market and return-on-investment by 50%, reduce total cost of ownership by up to 40% of edge services and decreased power consumption up to 90% with these equipment.

New Junos-based solutions

Juniper also unveiled new cloud networking and security solutions based on the Junos software platform and Juniper systems. These are built upon Juniper's simplified data centre network architecture to help customers share and secure their infrastructures whilst delivering and accessing cloud-based services.

New partnerships

Juniper announced new go-to-market partnerships with Dell and IBM to deliver Juniper systems as part of their cloud data centre solutions.

The Dell & Juniper partnership  will offer networking solutions under Dell's PowerConnect brand that enable customers to deploy a common network management platform and network operating system to help reduce operating expenses. The two companies will also collaborate on open, standards-based solutions for virtualised data centres and deliver technology solutions using Converged Enhanced Ethernet – a.k.a. Data Centre Bridging and iSCSI to improve network economics.

Under this original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement, Dell & Juniper intend to deliver a secure network infrastructure – from a customer's traditional data centre out to its branch offices, remote workers, customers and business partners – which can dynamically adjust to meet these challenges and provide orchestrated management of users, workloads and data – avoiding single-vendor lock-in.

Dell will also market, service and support Juniper's high-performance networking solutions to its large enterprise, small and medium business customers and public organisations. These products which will me delivered under Dell's PowerConnect brand include Juniper's MX Series service routers, EX Series Ethernet switches and SRX Series services gateways, all running the Junos software.

Under Juniper's OEM agreement with IBM announced in July, IBM Systems & Technology Group will offer its customers a suite of Ethernet networking products manufactured by Juniper. These include Juniper's EX Series marketed will be offered as IBM j-type Ethernet e-series Ethernet switches and Juniper's MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers as IBM j-type m-series Ethernet routers. They will run the Junos OS. The suite of six Ethernet networking products is already available within IBM's data centre portfolio. Due in the first half of 2010 will be Juniper's SRX Series service gateways.

Juniper had also licensed Junos to Blade Network Technologies to develop blade switchers for Juniper routers and switches.

NYSE listing

On 29 October, Juniper began trading its shares on the New York Stock Exchange after having been listed on the NASDAQ market. It retained its current symbol “JNPR.”

It also adopted a new logo, which a slimed down version of its old logo with the words “Juniper NETWORKS” in slimmer lettering.