Dartmouth College has long been recognized as one of the world’s greatest academic institutions. When Mitch Davis entered Dartmouth College two years ago as CIO, he desired to align IT better initiatives with its mission and strategic plan. Davis describes it “ICT 2.0” for the information, consulting, and technology that will retain the college on the leading edge of technology. Wi-Fi is top precedence. Students expect fast, pervasive, reliable wireless service just as much as an appealing curriculum, good professors, and a lively social life. But digital generation had pushed Dartmouth’s campus network to full potential. With 25,000 devices connected and counting, Dartmouth had seen a six-fold increase in mobile devices in the last several years. As a result, Wi-Fi was mediocre, particularly in historic buildings and large lecture halls.
Dartmouth chose the AI-powered WLAN solution from Mist, a Juniper Company, and Juniper switching for its campus wireless and wired network. The university’s technical team was pleased to see Juniper and Mist come together in 2019. “We began working with Mist and Juniper before the acquisition,” says Davis. “We saw the synergy.” Mist is a truly innovative wireless platform. Built with modern microservices cloud architecture, Mist delivers scale and agility with AI-driven automation and insight. A state-of-the-art wired network from Juniper provides the foundation for an exceptional user experience. Juniper makes a workflow-driven approach to automation easy with its APIs, and users can treat the entire network as infrastructure-as-code.
Dartmouth’s campus network uses an Ethernet VPN-Virtual Extensible LAN (EVPN-VXLAN) architecture to deliver Layer 2/Layer 3 connectivity with greater scale and efficiency. EVPN-VXLAN decouples the underlay network (physical topology) from the overlay network (virtual topology), delivering greater flexibility. By transforming their network from a simple Layer 2/Layer 3 network to EVPN, they can significantly increase campus security zones. Now they can inspect east-west traffic instead of just at the border.
Experience is the new uptime. The next decade’s network is revolutionizing enterprise networks with AI-driven automation, actionable perspicacity, and the agility plus elasticity of a microservices cloud. It applies artificial intelligence and data science tools to present optimized experiences and simplified network operations. Conventional wired and wireless LAN solutions are built on old-fashioned architectures that lack the scale, reliability, and agility required to address today’s diverse enterprise needs.
Juniper Networks’ wired and wireless access solution includes the EX Series Switches, Juniper access points, and Juniper Mist cloud services. Incorporating this solution, IT teams can streamline operations and simplify user and device troubleshooting while producing innovative and strategic projects with IoT and location services.
Juniper intends to broadcast the gospel of artificial intelligence across enterprise networking in the following months with new products and services. The expected movements are a continuation of a strategy that has been an integral part of Juniper since it acquired wireless and artificial-intelligence software maker Mist in 2019 for $405 million. Mist’s cloud-based Wi-Fi Assurance system includes an AI-based engine called Marvis that features dynamic packet capture and machine learning to identify, adapt to and fix network issues automatically.
Wi-Fi Assurance measures performance and service-level metrics to make wireless networks more predictable and reliable. Most recently, its features have been expanded include some of Juniper’s Junos-based wired-switch platforms.
Juniper offers flexible and simplified connectivity for site-to-multicloud, Data Center Interconnect (DCI), site-to-site, and user-to-site networking, all with optimized performance. And for branch sites accessing cloud resources directly, their SD-WAN solutions deliver smart, automated routing that aligns with any organization’s business, user, and application policies. To defend WAN, Juniper Connected Security extends threat intelligence to an organization’s Juniper MX Series routing infrastructure. Users can block command and control (C&C) traffic discovered by Juniper Advanced Threat Prevention, Juniper Threat Labs, and custom blacklists at the network hardware level. Juniper Connected Security turns your WAN connectivity layers into automated defense layers.
