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Not all environments are hospitable to regular networking gear. That’s where ruggedized equipment, hardened for different types of environmental conditions, comes into play.
Juniper Networks today announced its latest entrant into the ruggedized space: the LN2600 router. The LN2600 joins the existing LN1000 in Juniper’s ruggedized lineup. The LN2600 is a new platform for Juniper, but 
similar in some respect to an existing Juniper SRX appliance.
“While the LN2600 leverages existing Juniper technologies and JUNOS, it is a net-new Juniper platform,” Robert Grasby, senior product marketing manager for the enterprise business unit at Juniper, told Enterprise Networking Planet. “The LN2600 offers similar performance characteristics to the SRX650 in a hardened and ruggedized enclosure.”
The LN2600 packs 8 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces inside of its 1U form factor. From a security perspective, the LN2600 resembles the SRX in its Stateful Packet Firewall, IPsec VPN encryption, and integrated IPS.
Grasby noted that similar to the SRX, the LN2600 can take advantage of Juniper’s cloud security capabilities, such as Spotlight.
Ruggedized deployments have different demands than regular networking gear. The deployments are typically outdoors, subjected to the elements. Juniper hardened the LN2600 and designed it to deal with environmental challenges such as dust, heat, and rain.
Tough environmental conditions also mean that ruggedized networking gear is more resilient, since getting onsite to repair broken equipment can pose challenges.
“In terms of high-availability characteristics, the LN2600 does not have any moving parts, eliminating the potential for fan failures,” Grasby said. “Also, the LN2600 features dual root partitions on system flash, which protect the router from file system corruption by allowing a corrupted file system to be remotely fixed.”
The LN2600 does not have a redundant power supply, though Grasby doesn’t see that as an issue. He noted that the LN2600 is powered by -48VDC, which in most instances comes from a resilient source.
Moving forward, Grasby declined to provide any forward visibility into how Juniper will continue to evolve the LN ruggedized product portfolio over time or how it might integrate with Juniper Software Defined Networking efforts.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
