Juniper Networks and CANARIE Bolster Canada’s Ability to Conduct Big Science and Data-Driven Research

Juniper High Performance Ethernet Services Routers Advance the Capability of the CANARIE Network, Creating New Research Opportunities for More Than 39,000 Canadian Scientists

SUNNYVALE, Calif.— Juniper Networks (NASDAQ: JNPR), the leader in high-performance networking, today announced that CANARIE Inc., Canada’s advanced research and innovation network, has implemented Juniper Networks MX Series Ethernet Services Routers into its national network. This deployment will allow CANARIE’s 39,000 researchers at almost 200 universities in Canada, and their colleagues around the world, to exchange and analyze large volumes of information more quickly, driving innovation and important discoveries in areas such as treatments or cures for infectious diseases or pandemics, environmentally sound energy sources, new galaxies, and more effective ways to predict and respond to natural disasters.

The announcement was made concurrent with the “Summit 09” conference in Banff, Alberta, which runs through Friday, October 16.

When planning this critical network upgrade, CANARIE managers sought a compact, high-capacity and energy-efficient solution to increase network capacity ten-fold, from 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) to 10GbE. Juniper’s MX Series routers were considered to meet CANARIE requirements for a trusted, cost-effective, and scalable solution that allows extremely large amounts of data to be stored and transferred over the network, which can then be customized to meet the specialized needs of researchers as required.

“Juniper has supplied CANARIE with leading-edge technology for more than eight years,” said Eric Bernier, Chief Technology Officer of CANARIE. “As Canadian researchers increasingly engage in complex, multi-disciplinary and multi-sector collaborations with innovators throughout the country and across the globe, it is essential for CANARIE to maintain a robust and reliable network. By deploying Juniper’s MX Series routers, we are fulfilling a critical part of CANARIE’s technology roadmap and providing increased networking capabilities to help advance data-driven research in Canada.”

The MX Series routers are powered by Juniper’s single network operating system, JUNOS® Software, which integrates routing, switching, security and network services to deliver carrier-class reliability and operational simplicity. Featuring one release and one open architecture, JUNOS eased CANARIE’s migration from its previous Juniper routers to the new MX Series platform while preserving its existing infrastructure.

According to a recent study commissioned through Forrester Consulting, organizations using JUNOS can attain composite savings of 41 per cent in overall network operations costs across specific network management tasks such as planning, deploying and provisioning of resources.

“CANARIE serves a broad range of innovators at research and educational institutions across Canada, many of whom need to protect, store and access vast amounts of data,” said Tim Lambie, Vice President, Americas International, Juniper Networks. “Therefore, it is critical CANARIE delivers the bandwidth, security and scalability required by the world’s scientific community. With the expanded throughput enabled by Juniper’s MX Series routers, Canadian researchers can now share data and information in new and more innovative ways, regardless of network demand.”

Deploying the MX Series allows the organization to move forward with the evolution of research services with virtually no downtime, while meeting today’s demands of storing, securing and having access to greater amounts of data. Moreover, CANARIE has been able to reduce networking costs with deploying MX features like virtual routing, which improves network utilization.

The Juniper Networks MX Series is a family of high-performance Ethernet Services Routers, with powerful switching and security features designed for high-performance enterprises. The MX Series routers are optimized for Ethernet and provide high-performance and high port-density routing and switching in campus core and aggregation, data center core and aggregation, and WAN Edge configurations. The MX Series provides advanced routing features such as MPLS network virtualization, low-latency multicast, QoS, IPv6, and high-availability.