SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 6, 2014) - Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR), the industry leader in network innovation, today introduced a virtualized version of its flagship MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routing platform to deliver the industry's first full-featured, carrier-grade virtualized router. The Juniper Networks® vMX 3D Universal Edge Router, which operates as software on x86 servers, gives service providers and enterprises the ability to seamlessly leverage the benefits of both virtual and physical networking so they can rapidly deliver services and cost-effectively keep ahead of customer demand. Juniper also today unveiled a new set of capabilities designed to help customers build High-IQ networks that leverage the benefits of virtualization and automation.
It is estimated that there will be 50 billion networked devices worldwide by 20201. Service providers are pushing connectivity beyond simple access to fuel economies and deliver more personalized and life-enhancing services. As the appetite and reliance on customized services grow, service providers are looking for ways to address this need while staying profitable and capitalizing on revenue growth opportunities. This requires service providers to adopt a more agile business approach, one that allows them to develop, scale up as well as scale down new services at the pace of business, while also maintaining a high-performance infrastructure to keep up with increasing traffic volumes.
Likewise, enterprises are also looking for ways to increase business agility, as seen by the adoption and deployment of cloud services and private clouds. As enterprises look to the cloud to drive agility and efficiency, having a network that is as flexible and dynamic as the cloud is critical. As a fully functional virtual router, the vMX brings cloud-like agility to the network, allowing businesses to quickly roll out new applications, resources and initiatives to support internal and external clients.
By virtualizing the company's flagship routing platform -- first introduced in 2006 and today powers most of the world's top 100 service providers -- Juniper brings the feature-set and proven history of performance and reliability of the MX to the cloud. The software-driven technology delivers the agility to scale up and scale out as quickly as customer business needs dictate. Customers can combine the vMX with Juniper's complete physical router portfolio delivering the tools service providers and enterprises need to maintain a common operations environment for both virtual and physical routers, while matching network investment with revenue growth.
With the vMX, carrier-grade routing can be deployed in the time it takes to spin up a virtual machine, scaled elastically with virtual capacity, and if the need arises, migrated to the high-performance physical MX Series platforms for high-volume workloads. This provides customers with greater freedom to start small, experiment with new services, grow rapidly and stay profitable throughout the entire service lifecycle.
vMX News Highlights:
- Full MX Series feature-set supported on x86 servers: Because the vMX runs as software on x86 servers, service providers and enterprises can rapidly deploy new routing services based on an established Juniper MX pedigree. The vMX allows organizations to explore new ways of service creation and delivery models by reducing the risks and costs associated with a hardware-centric service roll-out. Service providers and enterprises can easily redeploy x86 resources to adapt to changing business priorities as customer demands shift.
- Junos and Trio Optimized: vMX runs on Junos® OS, one of the most widely deployed routing operating systems in the world, and supports the same programmable Junos Trio chipset features as the entire MX Series portfolio. For current Juniper customers, this means access to a powerful feature set that works seamlessly across existing physical and virtual infrastructure with no new training required.
- Built for the Cloud: vMX, built from the ground up to run natively on x86 servers, can be orchestrated by Contrail and OpenStack and managed by Junos Space. The complete vMX feature set delivers a consistent operator and end-user experience, providing customers with the flexibility to use physical and virtual routers based on business needs.
- Availability: Juniper Networks vMX will be available in Q1 2015.
Additional News:
- Juniper expands its Contrail portfolio with the introduction of Contrail Cloud, a new OpenStack-based software platform for cloud resource orchestration and lifecycle management that brings together compute, network, storage and virtualization. Together with Contrail Networking, formerly known as Juniper Networks Contrail SDN Controller, Contrail Cloud provides the foundation, framework and ecosystem that enables the delivery of a turnkey NFV solution to help accelerate service creation for faster time-to-value. Contrail Cloud delivers virtual network functions (VNFs) such as Juniper Networks Firefly Perimeter, a fully virtualized security solution that includes firewall, antivirus, antispam and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). Available now, it is supported by a broad set of technology partners, including Amdocs, Akamai and Canonical.
- Juniper also announced today that it is enhancing all of its routing platforms with the introduction of new Junos DevOps capabilities to deliver a programmable foundation for network infrastructure. Junos Continuity is a feature enhancement designed to allow new hardware features or upgrades to be inserted without having to update the OS version, avoiding costly qualification testing and delays to productivity for months -- even years. Junos Continuity will be available in Q1 2015. In addition, Junos is now able to integrate with a broad array of configuration management solutions such as Puppet, Chef and Ansible, and programming languages Ruby and Python to unify IP and IT domains, enabling applications to work more smoothly than ever before with one of the world's most widely deployed network OS.
To assist customers with the transition to High-IQ networks, Juniper Networks, in conjunction with our strategic partners, offers a full range of professional services. These include assessment, planning, and migration services to support customers with roadmap development, design, deployment and integration with their existing operations so they can start their virtualization strategy today.
Supporting Quotes:
"AT&T is testing vMX for use in its software-defined network architecture. With the rapid pace of innovation required to meet increasing customer demands, our industry needs to shift network infrastructures from hardware-centric to software-centric such that the network behaves as flexibly as the cloud. AT&T's Domain 2.0 initiative embodies this shift."
-Susan Johnson, senior vice president of Global Supply Chain, AT&T
"As a pioneer leveraging virtualization technologies across the datacenter, and in its Carrier Ethernet platform, Colt is a strong believer in the impact these innovations have on our business. As the industry focus moves to network virtualization, Colt is excited to see Juniper Networks' announcement today around the virtualization of many network functions. We have a strong relationship with Juniper and look forward to taking advantage of their continued leadership in this space."
-Nicolas Fischbach, director of Strategy, Architecture and Innovation, Colt
"As service providers transition parts of their network to virtualized network functions, they need to make sure that they are not compromising quality and capabilities. Juniper addresses those issues with its vMX and has announced a carrier-grade virtualized router with a full feature set, not a stripped down version of the MX router. In addition, having the same Junos software run on both the physical and virtual MX will offer carriers a level of consistent operations across both platforms. The new DevOps features introduced today are also features carriers want and need as they move toward more automated and programmable unification of IP and IT networks."
-Ray Mota, CEO and principal analyst, ACG Research
"Amdocs and Juniper are committed to supporting service providers in the transition to network virtualization. With Contrail, Amdocs has been able to automate virtual networking and create programmable service chains, bringing together both the physical and virtual networks. Juniper's deep experience in traditional service provider networking along with their commitment to virtualization makes them a key partner to support Amdocs in building automated, end-to-end service management solutions."
-Rebecca Prudhomme, vice president of Products and Solutions Marketing, Amdocs
"IBM and Juniper Networks continue to collaborate on open cloud solutions. Both companies share the vision of cloud transforming the creation and efficient delivery of services which enable new sources of revenue and improved operations for service providers and enterprises. The OpenStack-based integration of Contrail with IBM Cloud Orchestration capabilities extend the simplicity of service automation into the network, laying a new foundation for intelligent automation and service delivery."
-Dr. Angel Luis Diaz, vice president of Open Technology and Cloud Performance Solutions, IBM
"Juniper's work with SDN and NFV opens up a number of opportunities as operators think about how to best deliver new and exciting services to their subscribers. This spirit of innovation and forward thinking is very much in line with Akamai's approach to advancing the state of Content Delivery Network (CDN) technology. This shared spirit of innovation was recently highlighted when the two companies demonstrated the industry's first Elastic CDN solution that leveraged Akamai's leadership in virtualized Licensed CDN technology and Juniper's Contrail Cloud system. This solution addresses one of the key challenges facing the IP service providers due to the ever-increasing demands of multiscreen content delivery."
-Anand Parikh, senior director of Business Development, Akamai
"The carrier-grade virtualized router technologies Juniper is announcing today offers service providers an important set of tools to help them take advantage of OpenStack to deliver a range of new and innovative services to their end users. As an Ubuntu Cloud partner, Juniper's technologies are continuously tested in Canonical's OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL) to ensure they're compatible with 25 other Canonical OIL partner technologies. We will address the stringent requirements of carrier-class NFV environments, helping service providers implement an NFV-based strategy without business disruption. Together Canonical and Juniper are committed to a developing the OpenStack ecosystem."
-John Zannos, vice president of Cloud Alliances, Canonical
"For service providers, rolling out new network services can often be a complex and inefficient effort. Juniper's new vMX router leverages commercial off-the-shelf hardware and supports open APIs, which reinforces programming languages and tools, such as Ruby, Python, Ansible, Puppet and Chef. This advancement will allow us to spend less time manipulating the platform and more time creating innovative technology solutions with our clients.
-Frank Jadevaia, president, Intercloud Systems
"Juniper Networks' heritage is rooted in its willingness to challenge the status quo. Today, Juniper is once again redefining the industry by giving customers the freedom to leverage the benefits of both physical and virtual networking. How committed are we? We've virtualized our number-one selling routing platform so that our customers can increase service satisfaction, improve brand value and protect their profit margins. That's how much we believe in our customer's success."
-Rami Rahim, executive vice president of Juniper Development and Innovation, Juniper Networks
Additional Resources
About Juniper Networks in Routing
Juniper Networks was born from a willingness to challenge conventional thinking. Our routing solutions are the result of some of the industry's most groundbreaking innovations across every aspect of networking technology: in silicon, systems and software. They continue to be the industry benchmark for performance, scale and rapid services deployment, giving customers a competitive advantage as they set out to build the best networks on the planet.
About Juniper Networks
Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR) delivers innovation across routing, switching and security. From the network core down to consumer devices, Juniper Networks' innovations in software, silicon and systems transform the experience and economics of networking. Additional information can be found at Juniper Networks (www.juniper.net) or connect with Juniper on Twitter and Facebook.
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This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve a number of assumptions, uncertainties and risks including, among other things, statements concerning Juniper Networks' prospects, product availability, future products and prospective benefits to customers. Actual results or events could differ materially from those anticipated in those forward-looking statements as a result of certain factors, including delays in scheduled product availability, the company's failure to accurately predict emerging technological trends, and other factors listed in Juniper Networks' most recent reports on Form 10-K and 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All statements made in this press release are made only as of the date of this press release. Juniper Networks undertakes no obligation to update the information in this release in the event facts or circumstances subsequently change after the date of this press release. Any future product, feature, enhancement or related specification that may be referenced in this press release are for information purposes only, are subject to change at any time without notice and are not commitments to deliver any future product, feature, enhancement or related specification. The information contained in this press release is intended to outline Juniper Networks' general product direction and should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision.
1 "Delivering Digital Infrastructure - Advancing the Internet Economy." World Economic Forum in collaboration with The Boston Consulting Group, 2014.