The enterprise network has long been a crucial component of business operations. However, current business and technology trends — from globalization to the convergence of data, voice and video — are making the network more critical than ever, driving the need for non-stop operations. IT faces a number of challenges in reducing both planned and unplanned network outages and the resulting service degradation, whether they result from upgrades, hardware failures, software failures or human error.

Key to achieving five “9s”, or 99.999 percent uptime, is boosting device, network and operational availability. Juniper Networks has designed its new EX Series Ethernet Switches with all three aspects of availability in mind, giving enterprises the flexibility to implement high availability (HA) in all portions of the network. At the device level, Juniper provides hot swappable and redundant components and modular software for fault isolation, with in-service software upgrades available in a future Juniper Networks Junos® operating system.