Juniper Networks announces next-generation application acceleration hardware for Middle East businesses

The new WXC appliances provide distributed enterprises in the region with a more scalable, modular and cost-effective approach to delivering fast and consistent application response across the WAN to help ensure uncompromised access to mission-critical applications and services.

Increasingly high-performance businesses in the Gulf, Levant and North African markets are required to provide their employees, partners and customers with real-time access to important applications and services to meet business objectives.

They can't afford the risk of slow or unpredictable application performance across the WAN because it disrupts business.

"With the launch of the new Juniper's next-generation WXC hardware platform, our enterprise customers in the region will now have a highly scalable and modular platform, which delivers higher disk capacities and performance in a smaller form factor. This will enable them to focus on their core business and make the most efficient use of their existing WAN resources and improve application response time by providing a more LAN-like experience for branch office users accessing centralized applications. Our WXC solutions will be of great value for any enterprise customer with more than one branch - such as financial institutions, retail, and oil and gas companies,"

said Gilles Trachsel, EMEA solutions marketing manager, Juniper Networks

Juniper was named the Middle East's networking vendor of the year at the Network Middle East Innovation Awards 2008 and the next generation of WXC applications acceleration platforms build on the company's reputation by enabling businesses to optimize their Wide Area Network (WAN) resources and eliminate delays, as well as increasing functionality.

"The new generation of WX series platforms marks another step toward Juniper's common hardware platform strategy, which will bring greater scalability, modularity and operational simplicity to Juniper's WAN acceleration portfolio," said analyst Jim Metzler of Ashton, Metzler & Associates. "They form the important building blocks of Juniper's next-generation WAN acceleration feature set."

Innovative Features Extend Operational and Cost Benefits to Partners and Customers

Juniper is recognized for innovative features that allow businesses to accelerate high volumes of traffic across a broad range of applications, including TCP, UDP, MAPI, CIFS and HTTP/S.

Juniper delivers rich functionality such as QoS, content distribution and policy-based multipath along with an integrated configuration, monitoring and troubleshooting application.

The WXC platforms seamlessly integrate application acceleration with Juniper's best-in-class routing, switching and security technologies.

The new platforms use software that fully automates provisioning and management tasks, which provide the network and application visibility to help deliver applications exactly as intended.

The WXC platforms improve application performance over the WAN by recognizing and eliminating redundant transmissions, accelerating TCP and application-specific protocols, prioritizing and allocating access to bandwidth and ensuring high application availability at sites with multiple WAN links.

On-board hard drives provide support for Network Sequence Caching, which enable the devices to store repeated data patterns, and can produce up to a 100-fold increase in effective WAN capacity.

The new appliances can accelerate WAN traffic up to 2 Mbps for the WXC 1800 - typically deployed at small to medium branch offices; up to 8 Mbps for the WXC 2600 - typically deployed at medium to large branch offices and small data centers; and up to 45 Mbps for the WXC 3400 - typically deployed at higher speed remote locations, head office or data centers.

The new WXC platforms also support Juniper's universal Field Replaceable Units, which simplify logistical management and ordering for distributors and Juniper support depots, can reduce stocking costs and help lower the carbon footprint because less sheet-metal and corrugated-cardboard is produced, stored and transported.

In addition to helping its partners improve operational and cost efficiencies, Juniper is demonstrating one of its key corporate social responsibility initiatives of developing products that can reduce corporate impact on the environment.

"Juniper's best-in-class WXC application acceleration platform has been deployed by some of the world's largest organizations based on its ability to fuel large-scale, high-stake customer interactions and transactions real-time," said Ross Roesner, vice president, WAN Acceleration, Juniper Networks. "Our next-generation WXC platforms demonstrate our ongoing commitment to delivering the most flexible and scalable solutions that enable high-performance businesses to use their applications to accelerate a competitive advantage."