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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Systems/Enterprise:
JUNIPER OUTLINES VISION FOR NEW
PUBLIC NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE
In a recent document, Juniper Networks Inc outlined its vision for a new
approach to public network infrastructure that addresses the problems inherent
in today's Internet. Called the Infranet Initiative, the document describes a
public network that combines the ubiquitous connectivity of the Internet with
the assured performance and security of a private network. The new network, or
Infranet, is designed to unlock true multimedia person-to-person
communication, facilitate the trend toward machine-to-machine applications
such as Grid computing, enable businesses and governments to reap the full
benefits of Web-enabled operations, and provide the level of performance and
security vital to the future growth of the online economy.
An infranet is neither the public Internet nor a private network
infrastructure. The company envisions that infranets will be built
individually by service providers, but will be interconnected to form a global
"meta-network." Infranets will give each user his own unique slice of a secure
public infrastructure and will enable users to select and be billed for the
network experience appropriate for the application. Infranets will provide the
underlying facility for the extended enterprise and for business and consumer
applications such as utility computing, Web services, online gaming, rich
content delivery and real-time interactive services.
"The Internet has changed all our lives, but falls short of the
requirements
for a unified networking infrastructure and the assured delivery of important
services and applications," said Scott Kriens, chairman and chief executive
officer of Juniper Networks. "The technical and economic challenges of today's
communications problems require an enhanced public packet network -- an
infranet -- a superset of the original Internet. This model, outlined in the
Infranet Initiative, describes physically shared and virtually dedicated
networks that will be built with industry collaboration.
The technology already exists in large part to make this vision a reality.
What is missing is broad agreement on common goals and industry collaboration
to make it happen. That's why we created the Infranet Initiative, and we call
upon the industry to support it."
Customer Charter
The Infranet Initiative also lays out a charter detailing what customers
should be able to expect from the public network in the future. This includes:
the ability to entrust mission-critical and personal information to the
network; appropriate and assured levels of quality, security and bandwidth
across the entire network; and access to high quality, next-generation
multimedia communications services.
Industry Call To Action
There are three fundamental aspects to delivering the assured performance
of
an infranet:
- The ability for a customer's chosen application to automatically request
the level of security, quality and bandwidth it requires from the
network.
- The network's ability to ensure delivery of services with the level of
performance and security required by the customer's application.
- Selectively open connections between carrier networks that support and
reward the delivery of advanced services, such as content distribution and
virtual private networks, across the global public network, not just the
carrier's own physical network.
The Infranet Initiative calls upon the industry to work towards realizing
these fundamental building blocks of an infranet, and, in particular, to
enable inter-carrier connections by developing the necessary specifications
and sponsoring them before the appropriate standards bodies.
The Infranet Initiative document can be found at
www.juniper.net/solutions/literature/infranet_initiative.pdf.
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