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Juniper Networks is set to offer enterprises a lower-priced range of branch office routers and switches. The new offerings include downscaled versions of Juniper's SRX Services Gateway Routers starting at a list price of about $700(£470). The high-end SRX 5000 can cost as much as $1 million, said the company.

The new switches are entry-level gigabit versions of Juniper's EX line that list at about $100 per port. Juniper entered the LAN switching market a year ago with large enterprise versions of the EX line.

Together, the gateways and switches, which all run Juniper's JUNOS operating system, are intended to provide distributed branch offices of large enterprises with the consistency of a single "carrier-class" operating system and integrated security at a lower TCO than competitive and legacy systems. Juniper claims its "distributed enterprise" gear can provide a 41 percent reduction in overall network operations costs, citing commissioned data from a Forrester Research study.

Cisco rival Juniper unveils new network suite

On the services gateway front, Juniper will announce four SRX platforms this week: the SRX 100, 210, 240 and 650. All feature integrated content security, with unified threat management and intrusion prevention services (IPS) embedded in the JUNOS software.

The SRX 100 is a fixed configuration platform with a forwarding performance of 600Mbit/s and IPS of 50Mbit/s. The SRX 210 features an expansion slot for a variety of LAN, WAN and wireless interfaces, or an optional SIP gateway. It also features optional hardware acceleration for content security, and has a forwarding/IPS rate of 750/80Mbit/s.

The SRX 240 features 4 expansion slots, optional SIP gateway and content security acceleration support, and forwarding/IPS performance of 1500/250 Mbit/s. The SRX 650 sports 8 expansion slots, optional SIP gateway, standard content security acceleration, and forwarding/IPS performance of 7000/900 Mbit/s.

The SIP gateway features integrated FX0 and FXS analogue ports and is intended to work with call managers and handsets from a variety of VoIP vendors, including Juniper partner Avaya and rival Cisco. Juniper has not yet certified the SIP gateway as interoperable with any vendor, however.

These systems will go up against Cisco's Integrated Services Router portfolio, which has enjoyed considerable success in the market since their introduction in 2004. The 100 costs about $700, while the 210, 240 and 650 are priced at roughly $1,100, $3,000 and $16,000, respectively.

The new EX switch is called the EX 2200. It is a fixed configuration device with 24 or 48 10/100/1000BaseT Ethernet ports, and two of the four models support Power over Ethernet (PoE) for VoIP installations. All models provide four SFP uplinks, Layer 2 forwarding and the Routing Information Protocol in the base licence, and Layer 3 in an "enhanced" license.

Each switch consumes about 2 watts per port, including the PoE ports, Juniper says.

Juniper is also expected to roll out an automated technical support service for all of its JUNOS-based devices. This is designed to deliver automated incident management and proactive analysis assistance to remote JUNOS devices and users from Juniper technical assistance centre servers.

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