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 Juniper Networks, a leader in secure, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven networks, has announced the new EX4100 series of enterprise-grade wired access switches, which leverage a modern microservices cloud and Mist AI to deliver outstanding performance, ease, flexibility and security for all enterprise access layer switching environments, including campus fabric architectures.

In addition, Juniper has expanded its Wired Assurance, Wireless Assurance and Marvis cloud services with more AI-driven insights to maximise end user experiences and minimise 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 maximise 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 optimised 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 microsegmentation 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 and Orientation of Juniper Access Points

Many enterprises struggle during WLAN deployments to ensure that the placement and orientation of wireless Access Points (APs) match the planned AP design. To address this, Juniper Mist already supports a one-click ingestion of floor plans from tools like Ekahau and iBwave. Going further, the Juniper Mist solution now automatically validates the actual placement and orientation of APs post install against desired plans and highlights any misplaced APs for quick and easy correction. This is achieved via the Juniper Wireless Assurance service, which utilises patented virtual Bluetooth LE (vBLE) antennae arrays coupled with patent-pending algorithms that leverage channel state information and 802.11mc FTM/RTT.

With this service, Mist APs (Wi-Fi 6 and 6E) are automatically placed on a map and auto-oriented in the Juniper Mist dashboard, with the distances between AP pairs calculated and shown to eliminate deployment errors. By quickly and accurately validating the placement of Mist APs in both greenfield and brownfield environments—without requiring any other external technologies like GPS—Juniper substantially simplifies AP deployment and reduces overall WLAN installation costs.

New Marvis AIOps Actions Deliver More Client and Network Insights

Juniper has added several new enhancements to Marvis, the company’s AI-driven virtual network assistant, to improve troubleshooting and insight across the wired and wireless domains. This includes a Marvis Windows Client (in addition to the previously released Android Marvis Client), which is installed on Windows OS devices to offer 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 remediate any user issues.

Unlike other vendors that may require overlay sensors, Marvis clients get valuable client-side data with no additional hardware or software. In addition, 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), and delivers new wired authentication actions that provide administrators the ability 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 globally, across a wide range of industries. Gartner positioned Juniper as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure, with Juniper placing the furthest in completeness of vision and highest in ability to execute within the Leaders’ Quadrant. Additionally, Juniper was named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Indoor Location Services, furthest in completeness of vision.

“AIOps and cloud-hosted operations continue to be the biggest benefits to IT departments in the campus and branch,” said Zeus Kerravala, Founder of and Principal Analyst at ZK Research. “By embedding these capabilities natively into all of their access solutions, and constantly expanding them to solve the most common wired/wireless deployment, troubleshooting and management issues, Juniper continues to set the tone for enterprise networks that put user experiences first.”

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