Juniper Networks Powers a 5x Increase in City of Savannah’s Data Center Throughput

New “Core to Edge” Network Expands Bandwidth Capacity for City Networking Services

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Juniper Networks, Inc. (NYSE: JNPR) today announced that the City of Savannah, Georgia, has deployed Juniper solutions throughout its new data center architecture. Featuring 130 nodes around the city and fully redundant operations from two locations for disaster recovery purposes, the city’s new data center has just become fully operational, supporting information technology and network-based communications for more than 2,400 employees serving over 280,000 residents of the Savannah metropolitan area.

As a result of this major data center upgrade, Savannah now delivers up to 20 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) throughput, running dual 10GbE on 20 servers, versus a previous 4GbE fiber-channel network requiring more than 50 servers. In addition to providing the routers, switches, firewalls and SSL VPN solutions that make up Savannah’s data center infrastructure, Juniper Networks is also partnering with Layer 3 Communications and Tropos® Networks to power the city’s public wireless network, serving the city’s public safety and education systems. This wireless network is being extended to serve suburban and lower-income neighborhoods, as well as the city’s historic tourist areas and beaches.

Juniper solutions being used by the City of Savannah include EX8208 and EX4200 Ethernet Switches; J6350 and J2320 Services Routers; SSG550M Secure Services Gateways (integrated firewall/VPN platforms); and SA4500 SSL VPN Appliances. Juniper switches are also being added to the city’s remote fiber rings, and city IT managers are currently piloting the use of Juniper’s Unified Access Control (UAC) solution and IDP Series Intrusion Detection and Prevention Appliances for deployment this winter.

UAC is a standards-based, scalable solution that granularly and dynamically controls end user network and application access based on user identity, device security state, and location information; the IDP Series delivers zero-day protection against worms, Trojans, spyware, and other malware, detection and identification of rogue servers, as well as accurate detection and reporting on applications to more effectively manage and mitigate network- and application-level threats.

Savannah city IT managers wanted a single-vendor core network to increase security, reduce the costs of network maintenance and training, and facilitate rapid, flexible growth in network capabilities. City network managers concluded that the Junos® operating system would provide significant security and cost advantages.

“In terms of performance, security and cost, running our routers and switches with one OS, in one code release and one architecture, is a huge advantage over other approaches,” said Brad Goodman, City of Savannah Network Manager. “We’re delivering significantly more bandwidth and supporting much larger applications for our residents, with much higher security and at far lower costs than a fiber network with similar capacity.”

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.