SDA: Greg could you tell our readership about yourself and your role at Juniper Networks?
Greg Bunt (GB): I am Juniper Network’s Advanced Technology (AT) Director for Asia Pacific. My role includes leading the Advanced Technology team supporting mainstream sales in the introduction and promotion of some of the company’s most strategic product and solution sets. The charter for Juniper’s Advanced Technology team is to pioneer the company’s new advanced switching, WAN acceleration and unified access control solutions to the Asia Pacific market.
I have also served the security and infrastructure engineering at Juniper. Prior to my current role, I was Juniper Asia Pacific’s Advanced Technology Systems Engineering Manager, driving the adoption of the Advanced Technology portfolio from a technical perspective.
I joined Juniper Networks by way of NetScreen, when the latter was acquired in 2004. I was NetScreen’s first Systems Engineer in South Asia covering all ASEAN countries and Australia/New Zealand. I also built the regional channel and technical sales business, provided technical training for new Systems Engineers in the region and was the regional expert on 3G/GPRS firewall technology.
SDA: Juniper Networks is expanding its high-Performance network infrastructure with new family of EX-series of Ethernet switches. Could you tell us more regarding this shift?
GB: Aging network systems and old habits have dictated how businesses spend their IT budgets. As a result, a large percentage, if not a majority, of IT dollars are being spent to merely “stay in the race” and keep pace with the competition. While this model keeps revenue streams flowing for legacy network vendors, it doesn’t necessarily help
Businesses gain a competitive advantage by “winning the race” or “changing the rules.” Juniper Networks proposes to change this economic model by delivering a new family of solutions that reduce capital and operational expenses, freeing up IT budget dollars and allowing businesses to invest in innovative technologies that will reduce the cost of doing business while improving the bottom line. Juniper is also alleviating the cost, complexity and risk associated with legacy switch infrastructures.
SDA: Can you elaborate on some of the key features of EX-series of Ethernet switches?
GB: The EX-series switches enable high-performance businesses to deploy a high-performance network infrastructure based on three key tenets – operational simplicity, carrier-class reliability, and integration and consolidation – providing ubiquitous access to strategic assets, reduce network downtime and improve overall security to shared assets across the extended enterprise.
- Operational Simplicity: By leveraging the modular JUNOS software, EX-series switches utilize a single-source operating system that offers a uniform set of features, consistent implementation, and universal configuration and management tools. Running a single-source operating system with unified management across a high-performance network infrastructure enables faster innovation by providing network administrators with the confidence to quickly turn on new features while maintaining network performance and stability. A common operating system across the enterprise network infrastructure can further reduce training, maintenance and management costs, which translates into lower TCO.
- Carrier-Class Reliability: High-performance businesses increasingly view the network as critical to their success, and they can no longer afford the complexity, cost and risk of turning on new network features that can take down the network. To mitigate the impact of security risks on network operations, Juniper Networks has integrated its Unified Access Control (UAC) solution with the new EX-series switches to provide businesses with the ability to control user access to mission critical applications and company assets through the enforcement of end-to-end policies.
- Integration and Consolidation: Traditional enterprise networks are often built upon multiple layers of switches deployed in three general areas: access, aggregation and core. Originally designed to deliver scalable port density and performance and minimize the impact of network failures, these multiple switching layers can add unnecessary cost and complexity to the network and consume a large portion of the IT budget just to keep them up and running. Juniper’s EX-series switches deliver scalable port densities and carrier-proven high availability features that consolidate legacy switch layers, helping to reduce capital and operational expenses and advance the economics of networking. The EX 4200 series Ethernet switches with Virtual-Chassis™ technology, for example, deliver the same Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 10GbE port densities as traditional chassis-based switches, but at one-eighth the footprint and less than one third the cost, providing businesses an economical pay-as-you-grow approach to building high-performance networks. For greater application visibility, the Juniper EX-series switches will feature ASIC-based flow capabilities that permit the hardware-based collection of network statistics combined with the integrated ability to identify applications. This can significantly reduce administration and training costs, troubleshooting, downtime and outsourcing costs.
SDA: Could you tell us more about the Switches and their key features?
GB: As with all JUNOS-based products, a Juniper switching infrastructure will offer best-in-class differentiation along five dimensions:
- Lowest total cost of ownership: Enterprises will be able to run a single version of JUNOS with a consistent implementation of all control plane features across their infrastructure.
- Carrier-class reliability: This is provided by a combination of hardware and software features. Hardware features include hot-swappable power supplies and fan tray, redundant route engines, and switching fabrics.
- Scalability: The switches leverage ASICs already used in proven scalable products such as the MX960 switch fabric and the JUNOS operating system which powers the most scalable service provider networks.
- Security: The JUNOS software is a hardened OS through the separation of control forwarding and services planes, with each function running in protected memory. The control-plane CPU is protected via rate limiting and ACLs to ensure platform uptime even under severe attack. In addition, the EX-series switches fully integrate with Juniper Networks’ unified access control (UAC) product to provide both standards-based 802.1X port-level access as well as Layer 2-4 policy enforcement based on user identity.
- Intelligence: We have extended the full range of extensive JUNOS networking features across the product line, enabling carrier-class switch networks for the enterprise at a competitive price point. For example, the ability to remotely monitor traffic at the access layer without extending VLANs requires expensive chassis switches from a competitor; however, we enable this feature across the portfolio, starting with the fixed-configuration switches.
SDA: What type of customers would be benefited most from the Ethernet switches?
GB: This product is positioned for organizations that actually treat their network as a strategic asset, when it comes to their business. Some organizations are quite happy with networking, where security is not all that important. But organizations that are required to report to stock exchange or have accounting practices are the types of organizations that treat their network as a strategic asset and they are ready and asking for high performance networking. That is perhaps the target of this product.
SDA: What are the other types of switches that are available today and could you tell us some of the examples?
GB: A layer 2 switches operate primarily at the data link layer (DLL) of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. It looks at incoming data packets to determine the destination address of the transmission, after which a path is established through the switching matrix between the incoming and outgoing physical communications ports and links. Layer 2 switches look at the MAC address in packet headers to filter and forward data. More intelligent LAN switches act on information beyond the MAC address. Examples include the 3Com SuperStack3 family and the Dell PowerConnect 2000 series.
Layer 3 switch routes packets at wire speed using the network layer in the OSI model. At the core of these devices is a switching matrix that provides fully switched connectivity down to the port level. Wire-speed Layer 3 switching performance on a packet-by-packet basis is achieved through the use of custom application-specific integration circuits (ASICs). The performance is in the millions -of-packets -per-second range. Examples include the Cisco Catalyst 6500 and Extreme BlackDiamond.
Layer 4–7 switch also known as “application-optimization switches,” Layer 4–7 switches make decisions based on packet information contained in the upper layers of the OSI model, specifically the transport, session, presentation, and application layers. The Layer 4–7 switch can determine what type of user or device is requesting content and what type of content is being requested and make traffic decisions accordingly. For example, the Layer 4–7 switch can identify and switch Web traffic between servers or sites by reading into the HTTP (port 80) request header, the cookie, and the URL. Other examples of Layer 4–7 functionality include access control, bandwidth management, firewall load balancing, local and global server load balancing, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) switching, traffic prioritization, and URL and cookie switching.
Fixed port switch is a switch whose architecture does not allow the expansion of features or functionality by adding physical components (modules, blades) to the box. Thus, the number of ports and connectivity options are usually predetermined and not adjustable. Examples include the Cisco 2900 and 3500 series, D-Link DGS1200 series, and Netgear GS500 series. Unmanaged switch refers specifically to ports on a switch more than to the device itself. Unmanaged ports supply only basic connectivity without the addition of traffic control features. Examples include the Linksys EF family and HP ProCurve 2700 series. Managed switch ports on a switch enable the administrator to have much more control over the traffic flowing through a given port. Thus, bandwidth limits, prioritization, security, and so on are aspects that can be controlled on a managed port that cannot be controlled on an unmanaged switch. Examples include the Avaya C460 switch and Allied Telesis 8700 series.
SDA: Could you explain us the benefits of switches with virtual chassis technology?
GB: Modular switch often referred to as “chassis switches” and unlike fixed-configuration devices, these switches consist of plug-in units (cards, modules, blades that go into predefined slots) to allow for the expansion of features and functionality. Examples include the Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 4500, Enterasys N-Series, and Nortel Passport.
The Juniper EX 4200 Series virtual-chassis switches reduce management overhead by creating a single managed top-of-rack device consisting of two switches each across five server racks for a total of 10 switches. To provide the highest level of access connectivity and availability, two EX 4200 Series virtual chassis top-of-rack switches can be created, each consisting of one switch from each rack for a total of five switches per virtual device.
SDA: IT companies are often under pressure to coupe up with the ever-changing application and service requirements. How do you react to this?
GB: Since the switches are powered by a single, consistent operating system, the same operating system employed by Juniper router and midrange firewall products. The network infrastructure is exceedingly easy to deploy, configure and upgrade, saving considerable resources that can be reallocated to further improve business operations and increase revenue.
Juniper has an aggressive strategy designed to simultaneously advance the fundamentals and economics of high-performance networking, enabling high-performance businesses to “change the rules” with respect to their IT budget to expedite workforce productivity, support revenue and profitability goals, assume a proactive stance to risk mitigation, and realize a quick time-to-value from their high-performance network infrastructure investments. This will help to ensure that the Juniper Networks high-performance network infrastructure remains the preferred choice for high-performance businesses.
SDA: How do you see the future of Ethernet in the next frontiers for the technology?
GB: According to IDC, the worldwide Switch market forecast is USD17 billion and APAC at USD 5.5 billion. This looks like a bright future ahead for Ethernet!
SDA: Is there some thing else that you would like to add for the benefit of our readership?
GB: Juniper EX-series switches offer a more environmentally friendly solution. The Juniper EX-series OPEX savings are not limited to collapsing or eliminating switch layers and their associated costs. Thanks to a highly efficient and scalable design, the Juniper Ethernet switches also reduce recurring power and cooling costs as well as greenhouse emissions, making the Juniper solutions a truly “green” alternative.
According to publicly available data, the Juniper EX-series Ethernet switches consume much less power and emit far fewer metric tons of CO2 per year than comparable competitive solutions, depending on the application. Less power consumption means lower cooling requirements, saving additional energy and money. Combined with the low profile, space-saving single rack-unit design of the EX 3200 and EX 4200 series switches, the Juniper platforms represent a compact, energy-efficient and cost-effective solution for high-performance businesses.
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