Juniper Networks, a provider of secure, AI-powered networks, has announced the new EX4100 series of enterprise-grade wired access switches, which leverage a modern microservices cloud and Mist AI to deliver exceptional performance, ease of use, flexibility, and security for all enterprise access layer switching environments, including campus fabric architectures.
Furthermore, Juniper has enhanced its Wired Assurance, Wireless Assurance, and Marvis cloud services with more AI-driven insights to improve end-user experiences and reduce wireless management costs, including new automated AP placement/orientation verification and new prescriptive actions to address common Microsoft client, DHCP, and wired authentication issues.
“Juniper has become a leader in wired and wireless access thanks to our innovative cloud-native, AI-driven and session smart platforms, which save time and money and maximize user experiences by proactively solving real-world problems,” said Sudheer Matta, Group Vice President, Product Management, AI-driven Enterprise at Juniper. “These latest enhancements to our AI-driven Enterprise portfolio expand our value proposition to even more campus and branch environments while also doubling down on Juniper’s unique AI-driven advantages across the entire network lifecycle, from installation and configuration to operations and troubleshooting.”
The New EX4100: Enterprise-Grade Access Switches Born in the Modern Cloud and AI Era
The EX4100 is the latest addition to the Juniper’s EX Switching portfolio, bringing performance, bandwidth, port density and other key features to a variety of enterprise campus and branch environments. Like the previously launched EX4400, the EX4100 is optimized for simplicity and scale with native cloud-based operations, and it enables the best user and IT experiences with Juniper’s industry-leading AIOps. For example, Mist AI expedites deployment times with zero touch provisioning and automated workflows, and it delivers rapid troubleshooting with full stack event correlation, proactive anomaly detection and self-driving network actions. The EX4100 also enables IT teams to seamlessly design an EVPN-VXLAN network fabric that extends to distribution and access layers, coupled with important security capabilities such as MACsec AES256 and standards-based micro-segmentation using group-based policies (GBP) for growing needs of IOT devices. In addition, specific versions of the EX4100 support Power over Ethernet++ (802.3bt), making the switch a perfect fit for customers looking to transition to Wi-Fi 6E technology.
Automatic Placement & Orientation of Juniper Access Points
During WLAN deployments, many businesses struggle to ensure that the placement and orientation of wireless Access Points (APs) match the planned AP design. Juniper Mist
already supports one-click ingestion of floor plans from tools like Ekahau and iBwave to address this. Furthermore, the Juniper Mist solution now validates the actual placement and orientation of APs after installation against desired plans and highlights any misplaced APs for quick and easy correction.
The Juniper Wireless Assurance service accomplishes this by combining patented virtual Bluetooth LE (vBLE) antenna arrays with patent-pending algorithms that leverage channel state information and 802.11mc FTM/RTT. Mist APs (Wi-Fi 6 and 6E) are automatically placed on a map and auto-oriented in the Juniper Mist dashboard with this service, and the distances between AP pairs are calculated and displayed to eliminate deployment errors. Juniper significantly simplifies AP deployment and lowers overall WLAN installation costs by quickly and accurately validating the placement of Mist APs in both greenfield and brownfield environments – without the need for any other external technologies such as GPS.
New Marvis AIOps Actions Deliver More Client and Network Insights
Juniper has updated Marvis, the company’s AI-driven virtual network assistant, with several new features to improve troubleshooting and insight across wired and wireless domains. This includes a Marvis Windows Client (along with the previously released Android Marvis Client) that is installed on Windows OS devices to provide enhanced information and network visibility from the client’s perspective.
This information is relayed to Mist AI so that Marvis can make more informed and actionable recommendations to resolve any user issues. Unlike other vendors who may require overlay sensors, Marvis clients receive valuable client-side data with no additional hardware or software. Furthermore, the industry-leading Juniper Mist Wired Assurance service now provides insight to locate and correct the source of DHCP failures (i.e., server, VLAN, or client), as well as new wired authentication actions that enable administrators to identify devices and users who are failing to authenticate continuously on wired devices due to client-side issues.
Juniper continues to innovate and deliver on the vision of its experience-first client-to-cloud network through constant product innovation and by delivering real results for its customers and partners worldwide, across a wide range of industries. Gartner named Juniper a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure, with Juniper ranking highest in completeness of vision and highest in ability to execute. In addition, Juniper was named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Indoor Location Services in 2022, with the most complete vision.
