Where ever Mary went, the lamb was sure to follow

Hot on the heels of Cisco's announcement of Nexus switch line, Juniper announced its own entry into the high performance Ethernet switch market, with its EX-series of switches.  Junipers entry into the switch market has been rumored for a long, long time. The only question was would they buy an existing switch vendor (for a time Extreme Networks was a rumored target) or would they roll their own.  Well it seems they rolled their own and these EX switches sound pretty hot.  I had heard the name was going to be Hurricane, but maybe that was an internal code name. 

My buddy Chris Harrington over at Infosecpodcast.com reports on this as well and asks what if any effect this will have on their NAC strategy. From the press release, "To mitigate the impact of security risks on network operations, Juniper Networks has integrated its Unified Access Control (UAC) solution with the new EX-series switches to provide businesses with the ability to control user access to mission critical applications and company assets through the enforcement of end-to-end policies."  Sounds to me like the switches fit hand in glove with their NAC. I would imagine they are TCG complaint as well. 

This could be a real boon to Juniper in both security and the bigger switch market. It will be interesting to see how some of the other switch vendors respond to keep up with Cisco and now Juniper.