Over the past several years, Juniper Networks has been disrupting the networking industry with groundbreaking AIOps and a modern cloud that brings unsurpassed agility and scale. This has earned us the trust of top companies throughout the world and distinction from industry analyst firms, like Gartner®, where we are a Leader in the latest Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure (with top scores for execution).
To that end, today, we’re excited to announce several new enhancements to our AI-driven enterprise portfolio that deliver the performance, reliability and insight enterprises have come to demand from Juniper. While the competition throws around buzzwords and promises about future capabilities, we keep delivering new products and features that solve real problems, today. Below are the latest examples:
The EX4100 Switch Series: Born in the Cloud with Mist AI Coursing Through its Veins
Similar to the EX4400 Ethernet Switch release last year, we’ve introduced a brand-new EX switching platform that combines the best hardware with the latest cloud, AI and security technologies to deliver enterprise-grade reliability and performance with modern ease and agility. The latest features include:
- Driven by Mist AI™: The EX4100 Series is designed, built and optimized for simplicity and scale to deliver rich telemetry to the Mist cloud for device management, in addition to advanced client level insights and visibility in real time, so that it can measure, maximize and enable great end-user experiences with Mist AI, Marvis™ Virtual Network Assistant and Mist Wired Assurance. AI-driven switching and cloud management means less site visits, giving customers the ability to reduce their carbon footprint. And, of course, we are the only vendor with a common Mist AI stack and cloud across the wired, wireless and SD-WAN domains, ensuring the best automation, insight and proactive actions from client-to-cloud.
- Perfect form factor for a variety of enterprise campus and branch locations: The new EX4100 Series is optimized to meet the requirements of a variety of enterprise campus and branch access layer deployments while maintaining the same innovative software capabilities for the network of the next decade.
- Juniper Mist Wired Assurance Deployment Service: This service accelerates the deployment of new EX Series switches (greenfield), existing EX Series switches (brownfield) or switches from a third-party vendor through Juniper Mist Cloud Services, powered by Mist AI, minimizing the risk of downtime with expert planning and quality execution.
- EVPN-VXLAN capabilities down to the access layer, which gives network architects the ability to deploy a secure, scalable and flexible AI-driven EVPN-VXLAN campus fabrics solution with just a few clicks in the Mist dashboard.
- Security built in, as security is crucial to modern enterprises. This switch offers MACsec AES256 encryption on certain SKUs, as well as flow-based telemetry to detect and mitigate security threats.
- Power over Ethernet++ capabilities (802.3bt) on certain EX4100 SKUs make the switch a perfect fit for enterprise campus and branch locations for customers looking to deploy Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E and IoT technology.
- Fast & Perpetual PoE, which allows for a consistent power delivery experience in the event of a “switch-offline” situation, providing continuous power to anything connected to the EX4100.
- Other notable features for the EX4100 series of switches include Precision Time Protocol (PTP) transparent clock and the simplification of management with up to 10-member Virtual Chassis in a stack.
Simplifying Wi-Fi and Location Deployments with Automated AP Placement
As Juniper continues to produce the latest and greatest hardware, our AI and software capabilities continue to gain more features and functionality to solve some of the biggest challenges for IT professionals. For example, many enterprises struggle during WLAN deployments to ensure that the placement and orientation of wireless Access Points (APs) match the planned AP design. We traditionally helped on this front by importing maps from common software vendors, like Ekahau and iBwave. With the addition of new location-based Mist AI capabilities to the Mist Dashboard, we’ve taken it even further. Customers and partners who use our Wireless Assurance cloud service can now simplify their wireless network deployments with “Automatic Placement & Orientation” for Juniper Access Points (APs). With this service, Mist APs (Wi-Fi 6 and 6E) are automatically placed on a map and auto-oriented in the Juniper Mist dashboard.
Utilizing 802.11mc Round Trip Time (RTT) and Fine Time Measurement (FTM), this feature will increase accuracy for our location services by calculating distance between APs and automatically places Juniper APs on a mesh map. We know that proper AP placement and indoor location services are critical to optimizing the user experience; users expect high-performing wireless networks and, with this new feature, our customers can troubleshoot faster and more accurately before their users experience a problem. By quickly and accurately validating the placement of Mist APs in both greenfield and brownfield environments – without requiring any other external technologies, like GPS – Juniper substantially simplifies AP deployment and minimizes overall WLAN installation costs. This is great news for both customers and their integrators who are installing and optimizing their networks.
Extending our Game Changing AI-Driven Virtual Assistant, Marvis
Speaking of enabling great user experiences, we’ve also added new client and wired insight capabilities to Marvis—the industry’s first and only virtual network assistant driven by Mist AI.
For example, we’ve created a Marvis software client that sits on Windows devices to offer enhanced device information and network visibility—now from the client device’s perspective. While other vendors may require overlay sensors, Marvis clients (like the new Windows client and already available Android client) get valuable client-side data with no additional hardware or software. This allows for even better user experiences, as finding and remediating network issues for Windows users will be even quicker.
In addition, we have expanded Marvis Actions for switching to include two new actions: DHCP Failure Scopes & Wired Authentication. DHCP Failure Scopes will give customers context for exactly where they should focus their efforts while troubleshooting a switching issue. The scope context gives them the data needed to identify if the issue is at the DHCP server, a particular VLAN or a client. Wired Authentication provides those with administrator level permissions the ability to identify devices and users, at an organization level, who are failing to authenticate continuously on a wired device. The addition of these new Marvis features further exemplifies the experience-first value proposition that our customers have come to love.
Marvis is a key element of any IT organization. In fact, all support tickets are run through the assistant, so it’s constantly learning and getting better, resulting in the elimination of over 90% of user-generated wireless trouble tickets in some instances. This is the power of AI-driven support, which Juniper pioneered with Mist and has since expanded to the rest of the portfolio with our Juniper Support Insights solution, launched in November 2021.
Today’s announcements widen the gap between Juniper Mist and the competition, and enable our customers and partners to demand more from their wired and wireless networks. There’s a paradigm shift happening in the networking industry right now, and it’s driven by Mist AI™.
