Juniper upgrades management platform, adds a switch

Juniper Networks has upgraded its cloud-based management platform and introduced a new switch family for campus and branch networks.

On the management side, Juniper says the goal is to simplify network operations for organizations with a mix of campus, branch, micro-site, and remote-worker settings, and it is doing that by adding features to its Mist AI/ML cloud-based management platform and its Marvis virtual network assistant.

Mavis troubleshooting features, Windows client

Juniper has added a Windows client for the Mavis assistant to gather and pass along data about Windows devices so Mist AI can detect user issues and recommend remediations, Jeff Aaron vice president of Enterprise Marketing at Juniper wrote in a blog about the new features.

Juniper also added DHCP Failure Scopes, a tool to pinpoint the source of switching issues by identifying whether they are at the DHCP server, a particular VLAN, or a client.

Another feature, Wired Authentication, taps into Juniper network routers and switches for telemetry data that measures network performance and identifies devices and users that fail to authenticate continuously on wired devices. The idea is to provide administrators the ability to identify and block those devices and users, Aaron stated.

As part of Juniper Wi-Fi Assurance, which measures performance and service levels on wireless networks, the company has added the ability to map the locations of access points without using external technologies such as GPS. “Utilizing 802.11mc Round Trip Time (RTT) and Fine Time Measurement (FTM), this feature will increase accuracy for our location services by calculating distance between APs and automatically places Juniper APs on a mesh map,” Aaron stated.  “We know that proper AP placement and indoor location services are critical to optimizing the user experience; users expect high-performing wireless networks, and, with this new feature, our customers can troubleshoot faster and more accurately before their users experience a problem.”

New EX4100 switch

Mist and its new features are all baked into the new EX4100 Series switch, which is aimed at enterprise campus and branch access-layer deployments. It is a 1U, 376Gbps capacity device and comes in 24 and 48 port configurations. It offers MACsec AES256 encryption, as well as flow-based telemetry to detect and mitigate security threats, Aaron stated.

Like the EX4400 introduced last year, the EX4100 extends the ability to design and build EVPN-VXLAN network fabrics that extend from the data center to the campus core, distribution, and access layers, Aaron stated.