Months after announcing its partnership, Ericsson and Juniper Networks said that they have on-boarded more than 20 new customers worldwide and now both the firms are looking to MWC 2019 to share the enhancements to their joint 5G transport network and security solutions. Ericsson and Juniper portfolios are targeted at the communication service providers (CSPs) who are looking to deploy 5G networks
“The positive market response to our expanded partnership with Juniper is a testimony to the strength of our joint end-to-end transport solutions. We hope to sustain this momentum by further enhancing our leading, high-performance transport portfolio to ensure that next-generation networks continue to benefit our customers,” said Per Narvinger, Head of Product Area Networks, Ericsson.
With the evolution of Ericsson's solution for network slicing, Juniper's SDN controller, NorthStar, is interworking with Ericsson Dynamic Orchestration, providing seamless control from the cell site to the packet core network – including the data center gateway. This allows automation and integration of connectivity services in the transport domain into an end-toend network slice. With this solution, Ericsson's Wide Area Network Orchestrator (WANO) acts as a hierarchical SDN controller in charge of configuring connectivity services.
Transport orchestration added to Ericsson's network slicing solution provides the network slice with guaranteed bandwidth and key performance indicators, such as latency. Slicing in the transport domain is also enhanced by combining soft network slicing through Ericsson Dynamic Orchestration and hard network slicing through Junos node slicing on Juniper's MX Series portfolio. In combination with Ericsson Radio System, this joint solution will enable an end-to-end network slice on a shared infrastructure that can be secure, optimized and isolated.
Another enhancement is in the security area, where solutions from Juniper are being integrated into the Ericsson RAN offerings. In addition to the newly announced 5G High Layer vRAN, Ericsson security functionality has been complemented with Juniper SRX and vSRX gateway products as the IPSec security solution to elevate and extend the security framework across the network.
Juniper PTX, MX and SRX will be natively integrated into Ericsson Security Manager to reduce time-to-market by automating hardening and facilitating monitoring and compliance of security policies.
“By integrating complementary portfolios and technologies, Juniper Networks and Ericsson continue to partner and further develop end-to-end transport solutions for the 5G era – solutions that give service providers greater flexibility, performance, security and automation,” said Manoj Leelanivas, Chief Product Officer, Juniper Networks.
As part of the partnership, Juniper will continue to use Ericsson's go-to-market capabilities for mobile opportunities and Ericsson will include Juniper's solutions for edge, core, security and network slicing as part of its end-to-end 5G transport portfolio.
