Pushing the boundaries of sustainability in networking

At Juniper Networks, we’re dedicated to proactively addressing climate change. We embody our mission to make every connection count in networking and the world around us. As a responsible global corporation, we’re committed to influencing positive, meaningful behavior that prioritizes the best interests of our customers, partners, employees, and, of course, the planet.

We know sustainability is a top priority for all our customers, which is reflected in the increasing inclusion of sustainability requirements for vendor-level environmental programs in networking RFPs and tenders. This global movement requires specific answers regarding how vendors are engineering out harmful materials, extending the lifespans of systems and system components to reduce e-waste, reducing operational costs in the face of rising energy prices, and helping achieve internal sustainability initiatives.

Networking—including the devices that make up the WANs, data centers, and peering points that connect businesses to private networks, cloud, and service provider services—might seem like an unlikely place to start a conversation about corporate sustainability. But sustainability isn’t just a trend. Customers are demanding it because they face regulatory requirements for carbon emissions, economic pressure, the soaring costs of power, and it’s simply the right thing to do. This makes reliable peering to service/cloud providers even more mission-critical and encourages a stronger focus on WAN technology as a strategic enabler of sustainable business value.

Juniper is strategically positioned to further extend our reputation for technical excellence with robust responses to sustainability challenges. Juniper is advancing sustainability through decarbonization, sustainable technologies, and circularity designed to accelerate the net zero carbon emissions reduction targets.

We have strategically invested in renewable energy via direct projects and power purchase agreements, which are long-term agreements for the purchase of renewable electricity.  We have also demonstrated our commitment to delivering sustainable products to the market by investing in advanced low-power, high-performance ASICs and systems. Juniper’s multiyear advantage in AI development and AI for IT operations (AIOps) is being extended to produce desirable outcomes in a range of power optimization use cases. For many customers, Juniper increasingly represents the opportunity to increase the value of their networks and address corporate initiatives, making Juniper not just a manufacturer of advanced products but also an innovative partner on the road to a more sustainable future.

The hybrid financial and sustainability benefits of a WAN technology refresh extend traditional total cost of ownership (TCO) studies to include the solution’s ability to:

• Act as a hedge against rising costs of power

• Extend lifecycles from the current five to seven years to 12 to 15 years to help keep e-waste out of landfills

• Anticipate new applications and use cases by employing custom, programmable silicon for features that may not have even entered the standards bodies yet

• Harness the benefits of AIOps with products built to extract rich data and proven algorithms (for example, producing valuable insight that can support building power and lighting to occupancy patterns)

• Include the software and port density flexibility to satisfy novel requirements in AI/ML-centric data center applications

Juniper’s silicon strategy has long been a differentiator, and we continue to execute it with industry breakthroughs in scale and throughput. Consider that the Express 5 ASIC is Juniper’s highest radix deep-buffer ASIC to date. It enables the construction of a wide range of 100G/400G/800G systems, with 28.8T fixed-form factor PTX10002-36QDD routers to high-capacity petabit routing and switching platforms, all while providing more than twice the power efficiency gains compared with the previous generation.

The Junos® OS operating system continues to evolve to include power management capabilities in the WAN portfolio. Junos OS allows administrators to configure power priorities for line cards, manage Power Supply redundancy, and optimize power resources. The solution reduces power consumption through dynamic power management capabilities.