Juniper Networks acquires Altor, expands network security offerings

MelanieYarbrough — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 21:34:10 +0000

While most people fret about the hundreds of dollars now on their credit cards for the holiday season, Juniper has dropped $95M for Altor Networks, a virtualization security vendor. This partnership is preceded by the companies’ previous involvement with one another, providing virtualization services and technology to the enterprise. Mark Bauhaus, executive VP at Juniper Networks, says that the acquisition is part of Juniper’s goal of expanding its data center and cloud security offerings:

[It] will enable customers to deploy a consistent set of security services across their physical and virtual infrastructure, while delivering lower TCO.

This is Juniper’s second acquisition in the past two months, after the $152M acquisition of Wi-Fi vendor Trapeze Networks. The goal is to expand what executive VP of Fabric and Switching Technologies David Yen calls its “end-to-end networking product portfolio.” And it seems that joining forces with Altor is a means to that end, adding introspection technology as well as policy and compliance aspects for the entire enterprise or virtualized data center infrastructure.

With competitors such as VMware and Cisco also creating extensions from physical to virtualized systems, is the acquisition enough for Juniper to keep up?

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Juniper’s ‘New Network Initiative’ has the blogs a’twitter

Michael Morisy — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:57:44 +0000

Juniper’s currently unveiling their ‘New Network Initiative,’ and there’s no lack of interest. As the normally staid Tom Nolle blogs at Uncommon Wisdom:

We can’t apologize for the characterization here; Juniper announced a radical combination of an extensive service-layer software system and a new semiconductor architecture, taking the most profound step the company has taken since it was founded.

The new chip is a family, the first member of which is Trio. It is based on a “Network Instruction Set Processor” model that builds software on the device using instructions customized for network behavior control rather than general-purpose instructions, as NPs do. In this respect, the chip is almost like an ASIC, but unlike an ASIC it’s programmable at the primitive NISP-instruction level, so new features can be added right down to the instruction level.

That’s the tech speak, but Juniper Networks is using the launch as a chance to re-brand, with a new logo, a flashy advertising campaign and a jettisoning of the “high performance” slogan for a focus on being “the new network”:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/pb48EBFXjys" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

And it’s certainly earned the company its share of buzz, including some strong Twitter chatter and the chance to ring the NYSE opening bell. If you’re quick, you can still catch some of the announcement which is being broadcast here. Let me know what you think, either in the comments or at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Is this truly a networking revolution?

Enterprise IT Watch Blog » Juniper Networks

Juniper Networks acquires Altor, expands network security offerings

Juniper’s ‘New Network Initiative’ has the blogs a’twitter