Juniper Unveils Cloud-Based Educational Service

Juniper Networks has announced Junosphere Classroom, a new cloud-based service designed to enable educational institutions, partners and customers to efficiently and cost-effectively educate networking students and professionals. Junosphere Classroom is based on Junosphere, a new cloud environment that enables the creation and modeling of virtual networks and elements running the industry-leading Junos operating system.

Educating professionals about networking concepts, routing protocols and security paradigms can be complex and expensive. Providing the practical application and hands-on experience required to effectively learn typically requires a physical lab and a significant amount of networking equipment, which is costly in terms of initial capital expense and ongoing operational expenses. Junosphere Classroom overcomes the drawbacks of traditional approaches by allowing customers to create and operate virtual Junos-based networks — decoupling the educational process from the requirement for physical hardware and infrastructure.

Juniper Networks hosts Junosphere Classroom resources in datacentres, designed using Juniper’s networking and security technologies, which are accessible to students via a secure Internet connection. This “any-time, any-where” access to the Junosphere environment can extend individual study time, and is also ideal for providing remote learning and home-based education.

“Junosphere Classroom is a first-of-its-kind offering that highlights Juniper’s innovation and the value of our focus on a software business model,” said Manoj Leelanivas, executive vice president, Junos Application Software Group, Juniper Networks. “Junosphere Classroom brings the power of Junos to the cloud, enabling our customers to learn and experiment in ways never before possible. Ultimately, this ground-breaking service extends the value of our new network strategy built on a single Junos OS to customers and Juniper alike.”