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The addition of Juniper’s products to IBM’s data center networking portfolio provides customers with a best-in-class networking solution and accelerates both companies’ shared vision of advancing the economics of networking and the data center by reducing costs, improving services and managing risk.

Today’s data centers require higher performance and less complex networks as an essential element of their evolution. While there are extreme cost pressures on IT budgets, the demand on data centers only increases with exploding data volumes, demand for new services, speed and security, and always-on reliability. In addition, cloud computing will further drive the need for massive scale, efficiency and elasticity from networks and data center architectures. The broadened IBM and Juniper relationship is further evidence of the growing importance of the high-performance network in the progression of data centers toward cloud computing or cloud-like infrastructures. Both companies agree that a high-performance network is vital to the backbone for both the data center (enabling service production) and the global network (enabling service delivery).

The OEM agreement allows IBM System & Technology Group (STG) to brand, label and sell select Juniper EX Series Ethernet switches and MX Series Ethernet Services routers.

Helping Customers Reduce Costs, Become More Green

Juniper’s EX and MX Series products are designed to advance IT initiatives for data center consolidation, server virtualization and sustainable information technology. The combined product offering can significantly reduce network complexity and total cost of ownership by up to 61 percent in capital expenditures, up to 46 percent in power, up to 46 percent in cooling and up to 33 percent in rack space in the data center. With the EX and MX Series, customers can achieve greater operational simplicity, agility and efficiency for accelerating the deployment of new applications and services.

Broadened Relationship

In 2007, IBM and Juniper signed a pan-IBM agreement with IBM’s Global Technology Services (GTS) group that allows GTS to resell Juniper’s product portfolio as part of their Service Product Line (SPL) solutions, including routing, switching and security technologies. This reseller agreement will continue. IBM also offers their Managed Maintenance Services (MMS) on the Juniper product portfolio. The companies have since looked for opportunities to expand its relationship including today’s OEM announcement with IBM’s STG. IBM and Juniper have also been working together on joint technology solutions, standards development, network management and managed security services.

For the past year, IBM and Juniper have been working together on the Stratus Project, Juniper’s initiative to create a single data center fabric that will deliver a quantum jump in scale, performance and simplicity, with the flexibility to support fully converged and virtualized data center environments.

The two companies have jointly collaborated on a global technology demonstration highlighting how enterprises can seamlessly extend their private data center clouds. Through this collaboration, IBM and Juniper continue to install advanced networking capabilities into IBM’s ten worldwide Cloud Labs for customer engagements. Once installed, IBM and Juniper will be able to seamlessly move client computing workloads between private and publicly managed cloud environments enabling customers to reliably deliver on service level agreements.

Continued research and innovation in cloud computing security has been another focus for IBM and Juniper. The companies are jointly researching cloud computing security models to highlight how customers can mitigate attacks on corporate data and computer systems.