Juniper's new firewall burns the competition

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 16 September 2008 01:18

Business IT - Technology

Juniper Networks has announced new multifunction security devices combining firewall, routing, intrusion detection and prevention and with a firewall throughput of 120Gbps, claimed to be six times that of the nearest competitor. They are also claimed to use 50 percent less power and take up 75 percent less real estate than the nearest competitor.

The products, the SRX 5600 and 5800 dynamic services gateways are the first built on Juniper's new – Dynamic Services Architecture. According to Matt Miller, lead systems engineer for Juniper Australia and New Zealand, "With this new Dynamic Services Architecture we have built a multifeatured security device that incorporates security, routing and switching with QoS, NAT, IPSEC all into the one operating system, Junos."

Miller told iTWire that the new architecture represented the culmination of four years work integrating the ScreenOS of Juniper's 2004 acquisition of security technology company, NetScreen, with its own Junos OS, the modular operating system that is used across every Juniper product - a level of consistency that the company claims gives its significant advantages over competitors.

"When we bought NetScreen in 2004 we saw a lot of promise in their technology and while we have been integrating it with Junos in lower end products for some time, finally in 2008 we have achieved the ultimate goal of combining a high end routing platform with the strength and security of the NetScreen acquisition," Miller said.

According to Miller the new products will appeal to large enterprises, government and services provider customers. "Large enterprise are looking to consolidate their data centres and are very conscious of power and space requirements. Government is also looking to consolidate into larger data centres, and service providers will love it because at the end of the day their data centre is their profit centre."

Juniper has named Hitachi Systems and Services and the University of Frankfurt as initial customers, and Miller said the product was on trial with financial services companies and service providers in Australia.

According to Juniper, the Dynamic Services Architecture is "an extensible design that...enables fast, reliable and secure access to applications and services from a single network architecture that runs on a single operating system managed by a single management framework, which can reduce the total cost of ownership."
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