While hardware chassis, ASICS
At the heart of nearly every networking device sold by Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR) is its Junos operating system, which the company updated this week with Junos 10, extending the 11-year-old system with several new capabilities.
Junos is also used by both Dell and IBM in the products that they OEM from Juniper.
“A broad portfolio of products run Junos, with each quarterly release providing a continuous train of innovation,” Cathy Gadecki, senior product marketing manager at Juniper, told InternetNews.com.
That this week’s release is called version 10 is not necessarily a major milestone over the previous release of Junos, though there are some notable innovations in the update. Junos is updated every quarter, with the prior release being numbered Junos 9.6.
“While a jump to a whole numbers may have designated key developments in the early days of Juniper, today it is simply the tradition of the engineers to jump to a whole number at some point after reaching the x.4 milestone,” Gadecki said.
Gadecki added that Juniper considers each new quarterly .x update a major release.
That said, she noted that there are some key features in the 10.0 release. One of those is something Juniper refers to as the ‘Universal Edge,’ which integrates in edge router services including voice, subscriber, security and networking.
“Junos 10.0 provides new Universal Edge features for managing bandwidth, IPv6 for NG MVPN (next generation multicast VPN), increasing VoIP capacity and authentication methods for subscriber services,” Gadecki said.
Then there is something Juniper refers to as ‘Integrated Convergence Services’ in Junos 10.0, which has specific applicability to Juniper’s SRX210 and SRX240 Secure Services Gateways. Juniper announced the SRX 240 and 210 gateways in May.
Gadecki counts the Voice over IP (VoIP) functionality, 3G wireless support and new interfaces for WAN and LAN connectivity among the new convergence services in Junos 10.0.
On the security side, Junos 10.0 includes a new feature called IDP AppDDoS protection, an intrusion detection for application distributed denial of service technology.
But Juniper’s high-end IDP 8200 appliance runs Linux, rather than Junos. The move to include an IDP feature in Junos speaks to Juniper’s broader plans for its operating system and hardware.
“Juniper’s strategy is to integrate the services of stand-alone appliances into the Junos operating system, giving customers the choice of function-specific appliances or converged platforms, such as the SRX Series Services Gateways,” Gadecki said. “These new features are a continuation of that strategy to bring more and more integrated capabilities within the Junos operating system for customers that choose our convergence platforms.”
Junos itself is based on the open source FreeBSD operating system, which recently hit its 8.0 milestone. Juniper is a contributor to the FreeBSD project, though the code won’t be affected by the new Junos release.
“Junos does not upgrade its version of FreeBSD with each release,” Gadecki said. “There were no changes in the FreeBSD code from 9.6 to 10.0.”
