Juniper’s Anton Grashion said, “This could also fit very large enterprises that have a significant number of distributed acquisitions. Service providers could put this kit in their customers’ premises or in their own premises.”

The SA 6000 SP can be set up for end-to-end segregated virtualisation, enabling service providers to offer remote access, disaster recovery and intranet services such as wireless LAN (WLAN) and voice over IP (VoIP) capabilities. The virtualised SSL VPN connections can be tailored for each customer, allowing individual policy definitions for network security and management.

To ensure reliability, the appliance has dual redundant, hot-swappable disks with real-time data mirroring, and dual hot-swappable fans and power supplies. Up to eight appliances can be clustered together for high availability.

Juniper has also released two new hardware modules for its enterprise-class NetScreen-5000 Series firewalls and VPN systems. The 8G2 Secure Port Module (SPM) offers eight 1Gbit/s Ethernet mini-GBIC interfaces as standard, while the 2XGE module offers two 10Gbit/s XFP interfaces. These modules offer hardware encryption and Jumbo Frame support for increased network throughput, allowing better performance when firms implement emerging applications such as VoIP and video services.

The SA 6000 SP is priced from £13,700 + VAT, and the two firewall/VPN hardware modules are each priced at £35,500 + VAT.

Meanwhile, at the Carrier Ethernet World Congress in Berlin, the Metro Ethernet Forum – a non-profit body charged with accelerating worldwide adoption of carrier-class Ethernet networks and services – announced the first certifications of vendor hardware.

Also at the event, the European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC) organised the first public demonstration of hardware interoperability for Carrier Ethernet applications, such as point-to-point (E-Line) and multipoint (E-LAN) business applications.