Juniper Networks has announced several breakthrough additions to its cloud and virtualised service offerings as part of its software-defined secure networks (SDSN) framework. These enhancements include a compact and containerised virtual firewall called Juniper Networks cSRX and a multicore version of Juniper Networks vSRX.

Juniper Networks cSRX is a next-generation firewall providing advanced security for software-defined networks. The firewall is expected to provide a cost-effective way to wrap advanced security services around every workload and have the ability to scale up to high multi-tenancy.

The key features of the cSRX firewall include:

  • Advanced security services, including content security and unified threat management for providing security-as-a-service in large multi-tenant cloud networks with the lowest total cost of ownership.
  • A low footprint and a microservices architecture that is expec­ted to lower the cost to customers and make deployment throu­gh­out the network easier.
  • Use of Docker Container’s low overhead and sub-second boot-up times to bring greater agility and elasticity to customers’ virtual infrastructures.

Further, Juniper has announced a huge increase in the perform­ance of its vSRX firewall, which, according to the company, is capable of reaching a speed of 100 Gbps. This speed is 10 times greater than the nearest competitor and creates new possibilities for using agile and flexible virtual firewalls.

The key features of Juniper’s multi-core version of vSRX are as follows:

  • Linear scale of performance with each additional core. As per the company, the system was able to scale firewall throughput five times to achieve 100 Gbps, using just 12 virtual central processing units. This will make it the highest performing virtual firewall in the industry.
  • Full routing, firewall and L4-L7 security capabilities.
  • Scalable and secure protection across private, public and hybrid clouds in virtualised environments for high-bandwidth customers and applications.
  • High availability, granular security with segmentation capabil­ities between zones, organisations, lines of business and applications, as well as rich connectivity features like network add­ress translation.
  • Leverages the open source data plane development kit software architecture, an open source set of libraries for fast packet processing in order to take advantage of the performance and quality of service benefits from the Intel Xeon processor family.

Both products are expected to enable the network to better detect and combat threats through increased performance and intelligence, and a higher density of services on the Intel Xeon processor family (x86 platform). These enhancements to Juniper’s virtualised security portfolio extend the network and security administrator’s ability to provision and scale firewall protection, enabling more enforcement points across the network to stop threats faster.