Juniper adds policy control hardware

Juniper Networks introduced a new series of session and resource control (SRC) products today, adding its own hardware to a policy control solution that previously worked with a range of other gear. The result gives carriers tighter end-to-end control of application performance, the vendor said.

Available in April, the new SRC controllers work with Juniper’s existing service deployment platform, the SDX-300, a software-only solution deployed so far on third-party gear. Coupling the 300 with a mix of other vendors’ hardware left a certain amount of ambiguity about precisely what the resulting system was capable of. But by coupling the 300 with hardware tailor-made specifically for it, Juniper can say with much more certainty, for example, exactly how many concurrent sessions a given configuration can support. “In the past, that was a lot more blurry,” said Tom DiMicelli, Juniper’s product marketing manager.

Along with the new controllers, Juniper introduced six new software modules designed for specific policy control functions. For example, one module, the Policy Engine, monitors and allocates network resources, making automatic adjustments in response to subscriber actions, applications and network conditions. Another module, the Diameter Gateway, controls IMS applications.

Juniper also hopes to tightly couple policy management with its security products. “When the security products detect a threat to the network, they would automatically resolve the threat and segment it from the network,” DiMicelli said. “We could then take other actions within the IP/MPLS domain in the network based on a service provider’s defined policy--removing a given session from the network or controlling an abusive application.”