iTWire - Blade becomes first licensee of Juniper's Junos OS

Blade becomes first licensee of Juniper's Junos OS

By Stuart Corner
Friday, 30 October 2009 13:52

Blade Network Technologies has become the first licensee of Juniper's Junos operating system and will become the exclusive global supplier of Junos-based blade servers ethernet switches for supply to server manufacturers.

Blade claims to have seven million ports of its own BladeOS-based blade server switches deployed with 9000 customers worldwide and to be "the world's most deployed brand of blade server switches."

Blade will offer its existing value-added data centre features on the Junos based switches. These include network-aware VMready virtualisation, Active Multi Pathing technology, HotLinks for high availability, vNIC (Virtual Network Interface Card), OFM (Open Fabric Manager) and Advanced OFM.

Juniper claims a key competitive advantage in that its Junos operating system is common across all its products: from core routers to edge routers and switches, security and WAN optimisation devices. The licensing deal with Blade will extend this uniformity even further across data centre products.

Juniper is making a big push to simply networking in the data centre with its Stratus Project announced in February and the relationship with Blade was one of a series of announcement by Juniper this week in New York.

Peter Hall, vice president and general manager of Blade Asia Pacific said: "this new offering is a key element enabling Juniper, Blade and OEM partners to address the market with an 'open' unified computing solution -an alternative to Cisco's proprietary Unified Computing System... Now Blade will extend its franchise to serve those customers who want a common network operating system at all layers of their corporate network – access, aggregation and core."

Juniper CEO, Kevin Johnson, said the move would "Help customers achieve intelligence across the network, which ultimately reduces cost, minimises complexity and maximises user experience."

Blade's first Junos-based blade server switches are slated for delivery in 2010. These will be co-branded and offered by Blade to blade server OEMs under its existing OEM contracts.

Stuart Corner travelled to New York for Juniper's announcements as a guest of the company.

This article first appeared in ExchangeDaily, iTWire's daily newsletter for telecommunications professionals. Register here for your free trial.