The word Juniper always makes me think back to the Monty Python and The Life of Brian movie where a hermit has been living on juniper berries for years and Brian’s followers trample all over his bush.

Juniper has a totally different connotation these days, at least when we talk networking. Clicking on the header photo will reveal some equipment we are currently playing with in the lab before it goes live in the new data center core network.

Timico’s core network actually encompasses multiple vendor equipment but there are a few neat things about the Juniper kit.  For one they run a single OS strand across all their equipment whereas other vendors seem to fork OS having multiple threads across different business units and products.

There are obviously pros and cons with doing this but one of the things in favour of Juniper is the improved overall manageability of solutions incorporating their solutions. You also seem to get a fairly big bang for your buck with functionality such as VPLS and ports supporting hierarchical QoS included out of the box.

PS “Are there any women in this crowd?”

PPS if you have never watched The Life of Brian this post will mean nothing to you. It’s always a risk, living on the bleeding edge of technology blogging but with TV and movie preferences lagging behind in the 1970s 🙂