Avaya Backs Juniper In Branch Office
A team up between IP Telephony specialist, Avaya andnetworking tearaway, Juniper is set to bring a new branch office solution to market that commentators are saying could give Cisco cause for concern.
The two companies joined forces a year ago to put together aBranch Office solution for IP Telephony. Their first progeny is now ready to emergein the form of the J Series router - a device that will bring integrated communicationssolutions to the outlying reaches of enterprise networks.
The J-Series will ultimately combine Juniper’s routing andWAN acceleration technology together with Avaya’s industry-leading IP voicegateway and intelligent communications applications. It will be the first integratedsolution to emerge from the joint product engineering and software development being undertaken by the two companies.
The idea is to bring data and communications together in onebranch office device in order to reduce cost and complexity for larger enterpriseVoIP installations. The new J-series routers are available now, but the compatible Avaya telephonycards are not due for availability until first quarter 2007.
Once they become available in the New Year, Avaya’s newIG550 gateway cards (there are three models) will allow the J-Series routers to provide telephony support for up to 100station users.
Two analogue stations as well as two analogue trunks provideembedded local survivability in the basic card. Even more back up is possiblewith an expanded analogue port option, which supports four additional stationand four additional trunk ports. Another card features a digital trunk interface option supportinga single T1/E1/PRI interface; and a four-port ISDN BRI version for interofficetrunking.
Phone services actually rely on centralised Avaya call servers unless in survivability mode.
The new Juniper J4350 and J6350 J-series routers provide upto two Gigabit Ethernet and, of course, are telephony-ready. They run modularJUNOS operating system software, which offers many advanced services (MPLS,IPv6, QoS, multicast, etc.) and security (stateful firewall and IPSec VPN) atno additional charge.
The idea is for Juniper to progressively add features to this operating system to enhance support for security and so on.