News & Events

June 15, 2010

Too often businesses have gone down the path of purchasing more legacy equipment to fix breaks in the network. The upshot is dissatisfaction with providers, internal frustration and cost blow-outs.

A seemingly insurmountable amount of data, video, and voice traffic is hitting our networks with massive increases – each day. Staff, suppliers, management and customers want instant access to information anytime, anywhere. Unless fundamental changes are made, the economics of operating networks will become impossible for enterprises and service providers alike.

But what does this change look like? What shape will it take? Does it require significant cap-ex and large scale project planning?

One thing is clear. It takes more than servers to overcome network problems. It’s time to look at switches. What is needed is the right switching equipment to solve current networking challenges and seamlessly transition to faster, simpler and more secure networks.

New thinking: Reduce the number of tiers

A recent Gartner report specially commissioned to review established LAN design practices made the following recommendations to minimise the number of switch tiers:

• Review all LAN designs to determine whether it is possible to reduce the number of switch tiers.
• Ensure the resulting configurations are fully resilient, as failures will have a higher impact.
• When selecting high port count core switches, ensure that there is adequate switch fabric capacity.

The report confronted the networking notion head-on that “you need to stick to a traditional three-to-five-tier LAN design”.

“Existing LAN design practices are based on a number of assumptions about LAN switch capabilities that are no longer valid. Significant savings can be realized and efficiencies can be gained by reducing the number of tiers in the LAN switching network.” Gartner.

There is a now a very real, viable alternative on the market that is sending a message to the old guard. What’s the switch that’s making all the fuss? The EX4200 Series Ethernet Switches from Juniper Networks.

Flexibility to design, stack or adapt

“The beauty of the EX4200 switch is that it is early in its development cycle – less than 2 years old. This means it is a more flexible, more adaptable network component. Whether you want a greenfields solution or a retrofit – this switch can do both.” Richard Fairclough, Harbour MSP

The switches are powered by JUNOS software—the same field-tested and customer-proven operating system used by all of Juniper’s high-performance
networking solutions.

If you haven’t heard of Juniper, chances are you’ve used them. They’ve been supplying switches behind the scenes to the Telstra and Optus networks for years and are now making a move into the business market with the EX4200 switch.

This strategy seems to be working. The New York Stock Exchange recently installed Juniper switches across their entire network operations and locally the switches are making waves at Pittwater City Council in Sydney.

Richard Fairclough of Harbour MSP says the secret to the Juniper system is the virtual chassis. Like the core of a car engine, multiple devices run through one hub or management interface. This simplifies management and the user can do port aggregation over multiple devices.

“Up to 10 switches can be stacked on to the chassis. This stacking capability means you can add easily add more switches at a later date as your network grows.” Richard Fairclough, Harbour MSP

The Juniper Networks virtual chassis technology, which enables the switches to be interconnected and operate as a single, logical system, played a vital role in enhancing Pittwater Council’s network infrastructure and Disaster Recovery capability.

One switch to simpler management

Mr. Mitch Barr, network consultant with Candor Networks who implemented the system says, “There were loads of different options, but they were all complicated. With the Juniper Networks solution, you just had one switch. You could do the configuration on one box and it’s all done. All you had to do was tell it to forward the traffic to the IP addresses.”

A total of six EX4200 switches were deployed as a single core, with three installed at the main site and the other three at the Disaster Recovery site. As far as network management was concerned, all six platforms look like a single switch.

As a result, there has been a higher level of network resilience, a reduction in network complexity and optimization of network usage, with the EX4200 switches allowing the network links to be used more efficiently.

“The Juniper Networks solution has simplified the day-to-day management of getting the very new-to-market Juniper Networks equipment up and working with minimal interruption to our daily operations,” said Mr. Chris Tubridy, IT manager with Pittwater Council. “After-sales support has been there for fine tuning.”

More efficient transfer of data

Price-wise, the Juniper Networks solution was very competitive, costing about 20 percent less than its nearest competitor. View the Pittwater Council case study.

“The Juniper way is a different way of dealing with the network environment. It is a multi-faceted process not a single process. This allows separation between the control environment and the switching environment with effectively no downtime.” Richard Fairclough, Harbour MSP

Its compatibility with other systems means is a strong selling point and means companies don’t have to change hardware. Anthony Sarkis at Juniper Networks explains it this way, “Juniper is very open source, supported by open protocol. With this kind of open standard – you don’t just have to use Juniper at the one time, it can be a nice, slow integrated process.”

Importantly Anthony says, the EX4200 switch can be installed as one operating system with the same routing system across the lot. From an operational point of view this simplifies security, efficiency and cost. It’s modular and scalable and just as relevant for small to medium businesses as the larger enterprise market.

Frontline works closely with Juniper Networks in Australia and welcomes initial consultations on network capacity, performance and data optimisation. Need to take your network in a different direction?

Call 1300 362 610 to speak to a Frontline specialist.
Download the Gartner report
View the Pittwater City Council case study