Juniper Networks launches EX4600 Ethernet switches

Bangalore, India, August 14, 2014: Juniper Networks, the industry leader in network innovation, today announced its new line of EX4600 Ethernet switches to fulfill the increasing demands for highly available access to cloud services and applications across enterprise campus networks. Built on Juniper’s proven data center-class technology and the core design principles of its Open Converged Framework (OCF) for the enterprise, the EX4600 line includes open, high-performance, scalable switches with a small, flexible form factor.

Designed to help organizations make the transition to higher density campus environments and interconnected sites, EX4600 switches support high-bandwidth services like unified communications and collaboration as well as support access to cloud applications across the campus and devices.

The growing adoption of cloud services and cloud-based applications across enterprise networks, coupled with employees using their personal devices for work, makes it challenging for IT organizations to maintain sufficient switching performance that can scale to accommodate increasing volumes of traffic. Top concerns for companies are managing secure access, connectivity, and bandwidth usage, which puts pressure on IT teams to determine how to best connect all locations with limited staffing resources and budgets. Therefore, IT organizations require easy-to-manage solutions that deliver high-performance connectivity at an affordable price.

News Highlights

The EX4600 switches deliver highly available, simple and scalable 10/40GbE connectivity solutions in a compact and power efficient platform, making them the perfect fit for enterprise networks. The EX4600 line offers a number of advantages for enterprise deployments, including:

• Simplified Management and Reduced Cost of Ownership: The EX4600 supports Juniper Networks’ unique Virtual Chassis technology, which enables up to 10 interconnected switches to operate as a single, logical device with one IP address, and when managed by Junos Space Network Director, the entire campus and data center network can be managed with a common interface through a single pane of glass.
• Investment Protection via Scalable and Flexible Deployment Options: With its compact 1 RU form factor and complete switch features, the EX4600 can be easily deployed in various environments and physical layouts. It also has a switch capacity that can be expanded without increasing the number of managed devices, enabling customers to increase capacity as business demands, while ensuring investment protection. The EX4600 can also operate in the same Virtual Chassis configuration with any combination of Juniper Networks EX4300 and EX4600 Ethernet switches, delivering highly flexible and scalable configuration options including 1GbE access.
• Advanced Software Capabilities: The EX4600 provides rich Layer 2 and Layer 3 features, and provides In-Service Software Update (ISSU) capabilities for the campus and 40G ports with a virtual chassis option, enabling the delivery of new applications and services.
• Highly Available: The EX4600 includes a number of high availability features to ensure continuous and uninterrupted system operations, including active and backup routing engines, graceful failover, ISSU capabilities and quality of service (QoS) to prioritize time-sensitive data. Pairing ISSU with MC-LAG provides redundancy/resiliency in the aggregation layer and also provides hitless upgrades so that both LAG switches stay operating and full bandwidth is available to applications.
• Automated Provisioning: The EX4600 enables customers to reduce time and cost of deployment by supporting a number of features for network automation and plug-and-play operations. Features include zero-touch provisioning, operations and events scripts, automatic rollback and Python scripting, as well as integration with OpenStack and Chef.
• Insight Technology for Advanced Analytics: The EX4600 provides dynamic buffer utilization monitoring and reporting to provide detailed insight and data on network traffic, which enables network administrators to ensure application performance as well as make informed network design decisions and proactively identify hotspots.

Mike Marcellin, senior vice president strategy and marketing, Juniper Networks said, “As more and more personal devices are being brought into the campus and enterprises continue to deploy cloud-based business applications, great demands are being put on the campus network to not only support varying devices but also ensure uninterrupted data access to cloud services. To meet these evolving requirements, Juniper has built its new EX4600 switches on the design principles of our new Open Converged Framework for the cloud-enabled campus – an open architecture that embraces third party solutions, provides a virtualized and programmable platform to enable network function convergence with a plug-and-play design that seamlessly scales as campus cloud requirements demand.”