Customer Success Story

Building a Secure Data Center Interconnect

The highly acclaimed London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) shares data centers with other universities and taps into the Janet academic network.

The LSE campus in central London serves 9,600 students from 140 countries, and its staff numbers more than 3300. The school connects to other higher-education establishments and a regional academic network with a strong focus on security and future-proofing.

Overview

Company London School of Economics and Political Science
Industry Education
Products used MX240,  QFX5100,  SRX5400
Region EMEA
London School of Economics and Political Science Image
"Now we are running bigger, better, and faster. We have 10 Gbps wherever we need it, end-to-end. We can support more applications, and the whole system is far more robust."
Matt Bernstein Senior Network Architect, London School of Economics

Business Challenge

LSE needed to interconnect a campus network securely and resiliently with data centers to support increasing demand for more applications. It also wanted to create a foundation for network automation and to retain its virtual LAN architecture while protecting against the operational risks of large Layer 2 networks.

Technology Solution

Using Juniper MX240 3D Universal Edge Routers, LSE created a resilient mesh of VPNs between campus and data centers running Ethernet VPN (EVPN) services over generic routing encapsulation (GRE) over IPsec tunnels. The Juniper SRX5400 Services Gateway acts as a data center firewall, and QFX5100 switches provide a virtual data center fabric.

Business Results

A secure 10-Gbps network supports more than 200 applications, enabling better research and teaching capabilities. The Ethernet VPN lets LSE retain its virtual LAN design while mitigating the risks of large Layer-2 networks. Automation makes it easy to implement network configurations.

"We can’t know what our academics will need from the IT infrastructure in a few years’ time, so we built in a future-proof network from day one. The solution anticipates future capacity, topologies, and automation technologies like SDN, because we believe we can do more or less anything we need to on the Juniper equipment."
Matt Bernstein Senior Network Architect, London School of Economics

The Products

Several different MX series universal routing platforms from front view.
PRODUCT FAMILY

MX Series Universal Routing Platforms

With a robust portfolio of SDN-enabled routers, the MX Series provides industry-leading system capacity, density, security, and performance with unparalleled longevity.

Three QFX series network switches front angle
PRODUCT FAMILY

QFX Series Switches

QFX network switches deliver industry-leading throughput and scalability, a comprehensive routing stack, the open programmability of Junos OS, and the broadest set of EVPN-VXLAN and IP fabric capabilities. Juniper offers a wide range of switches for data center spine and leaf switches, campus distribution and core, or data center gateway and interconnect.

SRX Series Family product image
PRODUCT FAMILY

SRX Series Firewalls

Protect your network edge, data center, and cloud applications with Juniper next-generation physical, virtual, and containerized firewalls, all managed via Juniper Security Director Cloud.

Front with Top View of JA2500
Product

Junos Space Network Management Platform

Junos Space Network Management Platform is a centralized platform for managing and orchestrating network devices and services through a single pane of glass.