Juniper's Network Acceleration Devices Are 'Ready for IBM'

Published: August 29, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Juniper Networks, a developer of network acceleration devices, has successfully tested and validated that its devices work properly with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino, Workplace, and WebSphere Portal applications, the vendor announced last week. As a result, the Silicon Valley firm was awarded the "Ready for IBM" validation.

Juniper Networks is perhaps the largest and most visible of a growing number of vendors attacking the burgeoning market for devices that help tame the voracious appetites of bandwidth-intensive applications, such as Notes/Domino, through a combination of caching, compression algorithms, and other clever techniques. In some cases, these devices, such as some of the devices from Juniper, also provide encryption.

Last week, Juniper announced that its DX, WX, and WXC line of appliances have demonstrated full interoperability with the WebSphere Portal and Lotus Notes/Domino applications, including Workplace Services Express and Workplace Collaboration Services applications. The announcement bears the blessing of IBM, which participated in the testing.

Juniper's line of appliances are platform agnostic, and are used to boost the available bandwidth of applications residing on OS/400 servers. One such iSeries shop utilizing a Juniper device is U.S. Cold Storage, a New Jersey provider of refrigerated transportation and logistics.

"We selected IBM Lotus Notes running on an IBM iSeries 810 server as our internal communications application," said Timothy Brennan, IT director at U.S. Cold. "But Lotus Notes is a bandwidth-intensive application, and our branch-office users were disappointed with the initial response times. The WX platform gave us all the bandwidth needed to provide the performance our users require--LAN-like performance over our WAN. The interoperability between the WX platform and Lotus Notes is clearly a critical component of our deployment."