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Juniper's 2018 spring collection: Switches, security, and subs

Daaahlink! Cloud was so 2017. This year is about multicloud

Juniper Networks has taken the tube labelled 'multicloud' out of the paint-box and applied a liberal coat to the latest updates to its switching products.

The two legs the strategy stands on, Juniper reckons, are security and automation - which are where the company wants to take itself anyhow. Security was one of the company's bright spots in its 2017-2018 results (revenue jumped eight per cent in the year), and it's been trumpeting automation for years.

The data centre gets a new switch in the QFX line: the QFX10002-60C, suitable for spine deployment or at the edge as a data centre interconnect, with 60 100 Gbps Ethernet "deep buffer" interfaces.

There are two other switches in the launch party - a 64x100 Gbps spine switch (the Broadcom Tomahawk-based QFX5210-64c) and the 48x25 (the QFX5200-48Y) Gbps top-of-rack switch. The QFX10000 30-port 100 Gbps Ethernet switch get a MAC-layer encrypted line card, the QFX MACsec.

In the campus environment, the EX Series switch family gets three new members, the EX2300 and EX4300, the latter with MACsec; and there's the EX9250 switch, which supports Junos Fusion and EVPN-VXLAN fabric support. The EX4300 also supports the 60W four-pair PoE++ standard.

EX Series and SRX Series switches and firewalls got another management option - the SaaS Juniper Sky Enterprise, which handles deployment, configuration and management. To put wireless access points under the same monitoring regime as the rest of the network, Sky Enterprise integrates with Aerohive's Hive Manager NG API (as Packet Pushers notes, this integration only pulls monitoring data into the Juniper environment - WiFi network management is back in Aerohive's HiveManager).

A network services platform expands branch connectivity options: the NFX150 includes security, hybrid WAN inter-branch connectivity including 4G and LTE, and the ability to run third-party virtual network functions (VNFs).

Because subscriptions are the new black-ink-generators, the Contrail SD-WAN (which bundles the SRX Series gateway and NFX Series platforms with orchestration software) has been granted new options in its subscription pricing, for different endpoint and virtual endpoint options (for example, by bandwidth) and SD-WAN management.

Your little voice is, by now, probably telling you there's a lot of switches and not so much cloud - but there are two new virtualised offerings: the vSRX security appliance and vMX router can now be spun up in AWS and Azure environments, to help users create secure connections to public clouds, whether from data centres or branch locations. Sysadmins setting up the virty-boxen can use Ansible playbooks as their template, Amazon's CloudFormation, or HashiCorp's Terraform. ®

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