Juniper Networks reaches significant milestone with its IBM OEM relationship

Mark Bauhaus, executive vice president and general manager, Service Layer Technology Business Group, Juniper Networks, said:

"We are continuing to combine breakthrough technology with a world class partnership to help customers reinvent the experience and economics of networking. The continued expansion of the IBM and Juniper OEM demonstrates our joint commitment to propelling a dynamic network infrastructure that is open, scalable, simple and secure to address the exploding scale of Internet services for personal and business productivity."

"IBM is focused on providing its customers with the best networking choices and flexibility in their solutions, which is why we're pleased to offer IBM j-type Ethernet networking products running the Junos operating system as part of our data center networking portfolio," said Barry Rudolph, vice president, IBM System Storage. "The continued success of our relationship and expansion of our OEM partnership will help us reach our shared vision of advancing the economics of networking and the data center."

Today's data centers require higher performance and less complex networks as an essential element of their evolution. While there are extreme cost pressures on IT budgets, the demand on data centers only increases with exploding data volumes, demand for new services, speed and security, and always-on reliability. In addition, cloud computing will further drive the need for massive scale, efficiency, elasticity and security from networks and data center architectures.

The IBM and Juniper relationship is further evidence of the growing importance of the high-performance network in the progression of data centers toward cloud computing or cloud-like infrastructures. Both companies agree a high-performance, secure network is vital to the operations of both the data center (enabling service production) and the global network (enabling service delivery).

IBM and Juniper entered into the OEM agreement in July 2009. The agreement allows the IBM System & Technology Group (STG) to brand, label and sell select Juniper Networks EX Series Ethernet Switches as IBM j-type e-series Ethernet switches and MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers as IBM j-type m-series Ethernet routers. The suite of six Ethernet networking products is now generally available within IBM's data center portfolio. The expanded OEM agreement adds the SRX Series Services Gateways, which will be available in the first half of 2010.