IT Strategy on Ulitzer

With IBM and Dell watching its back, Juniper strode into town Thursday like a gunslinger twirling its pearl-handled six-guns around ready to take on Cisco, the fastest gun in the West, and all the other network hombres.

The mid-sized company opened its barrage at the New York Stock Exchange, a new Juniper customer, on the 40th anniversary of ARPAnet.

It claims the Internet and its newfangled cloud progeny - which are doing things they weren't designed to do - are cracking under the load and are going to spin out of orbit any minute now. The model they're built on isn't going to work going forward, it said.

But fear not. It has the solution.

It's called the "New Network" and the vision, which called for Juniper to dream up with a new logo, is supposed to reinvent the network and the economics of networking and save the day complements of its new software, silicon, systems and partnerships.

Juniper is, for instance, promising to roll out new line cards and routers that process two to four times more traffic than the competition.

Its soon-to-be new flagship MX960 router, due out in December, is supposed to be able to download the entire contents of the Library of Congress in 12 seconds and access 8.5 million iTunes in a tenth of a second, 50 Blu-Ray DVDs in less than five seconds, 10 years of Hubble Telescope data in a minute and 430,000 HDTV channels simultaneously.

It will be built around a 65nm Junos Trio chipset, part of a new Junos One processor family, that's supposed to let networks scale dynamically and provide more bandwidth, subscribers and services all at the same time - no compromise, Juniper says.

It also claims breakthroughs in delivering rich business, residential and mobile services at massive scale at half the power per gigabit.

The chipset, code named Trinity, cost $80 million and five years to develop and there are 30 patents pending on the thing.

The purpose-built, industry-first "network instruction set," built into the silicon, is supposed to combine the performance benefits of ASICs with the flexibility of network processors and yield total router throughput of 2.6 terabits a second and nimbly manage 2.3 million subscribers on a rack.

The glory of widgetry, however, is a technology called 3D Scaling responsible for the breathtaking numbers.

Juniper calls 3D Scaling "one of those rare technology breakthroughs that can change business models" and it intends to use the secret sauce in its switches and security products too.

It claims the widgetry will offer a potential 540% increase in ROI over five years, improve power efficiency by 10 to one over other vendors, and cut aggregation services opex by a possible 47%, business services opex by up to 63%, and residential services by maybe 77%.

Of course what's a router without software, and the keystone of Juniper's platform is Junos, its updated open network operating system, Juniper's answer to Cisco's Internetwork Operating System (IOS).

The software now also includes Junos Space, available at prices starting at $15,000, and Junos Pulse, coming in the first half of next year.

Space is an open network application development and deployment platform, an SDK and an API meant to be used by third parties although it hasn't been yet.

Pulse is an integrated multi-service network client that's supposed to reduce the number of client applications that have to be distributed and supported and provide the location-aware and identity-aware access to networks that are currently available from Juniper in separate network clients.

Space is supposed to simplify network operations, automate support and accelerate service delivery. It ships initially pre-loaded with three Juniper-provided applications: Ethernet Activator, which is supposed to activate services, including VPN services, up to 10 times faster than the competition; Route Analyzer, from Packet Design, a company Juniper put money in a year ago, which is supposed to provide DVR-like recording and playback capability to plan, simulate and troubleshoot MPLS networks; and the very sensible time-saving Service Now, which is supposed resolve service issues by having Juniper systems "call" Juniper support experts with troubleshooting data and details.

And for the cloud people Juniper will have gateways in the first half that reportedly scale to support 10 million concurrent user sessions - 2.5 times more than Juniper's previous generation and five times more than Cisco.

The company also say the gateways can deliver up to six times faster firewall and seven times faster intrusion prevention services at a 50% power savings and 67% space savings over Cisco for comparable throughput.

It also got a bunch of tools for securing cloud services along with new support for VMware and Citrix.

Apparently Microsoft's going to be using Juniper's widgetry in Azure.

IBM, which cut a Cisco-snubbing OEM deal with Juniper in July because of Cisco's adventure into servers, is going to pick up Juniper's upcoming gateways in addition to its Ethernet switches and routers and sell them under the IBM label.

IBM and Juniper already have a collaborative single fabric project called Stratus that's supposed to simplify the cloud infrastructure by reducing components and collapsing tiers, share pools of resources and secure everything that they announced in February. No more news on that score.

Dell is going to sell Juniper Networks' widgets direct and indirect under its PowerConnect brand.

The stuff includes Juniper's MX routers, EX Ethernet switches and SRX gateways, all running Junos, the same stuff as IBM.

Forget that Dell already carries stuff like this from Brocade; that only underscores its message to Cisco.

Dell and Juniper are planning to work together on open, standards-based solutions for virtualized data centers and deliver technology solutions using Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), a k a Data Center Bridging (DCB) and iSCSI to improve network economics. They mean to deliver a secure network infrastructure from a customer's traditional data center out to its branch offices, remote workers, customers and business partners and provide orchestrated management of users, workloads and data - in the name of avoiding single-vendor lock-in.

Dell also plans to market, service and support Juniper's high-performance networking solutions.

Meanwhile, Blade Network Technologies has licensed Junos, Juniper's first licensing deal, to develop blade server switches under an exclusive arrangement that sees it sell them to server makers worldwide.

Blade, a big player in the space, will put its value-added data center features on the switches, such as network-aware VMready virtualization, AMP Active Multi-Pathing technology, HotLinks for high availability as well as offer a vNIC (Virtual Network Interface Card), OFM (Open Fabric Manager) and Advanced OFM.

Juniper also claims to have the first 120 Gbps line card with the highest 10GE density for aggregation, video distribution, data center and edge routing; the industry's only edge routing with line-rate 100GbE performance for edge uplink, inter-data center and high-bandwidth aggregation; the industry's most powerful 3.5-inch routers (eight times faster than competitors) designed for delivering Carrier Ethernet services for multi-tenant buildings, as well as mobile aggregation, video and enterprise edge deployments; an Active Broadband Networks application in development for monitoring cable bandwidth and improving cable subscriber experiences; an Ankeena Networks application for video streaming and caching to enable low-cost, TV-like viewing; and a coy Project Falcon reference architecture for the mobile space.