SCIENCE

Juniper Networks announced that it has become a strategic network provider to Standard Chartered Bank, an industry leader within emerging markets across Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Juniper Networks EX Series Ethernet Switches and SRX Series Services Gateways, which run the Junos operating system, have been deployed to create a secure, high-performance, scalable core, access and data center network infrastructure at Standard Chartered sites in Singapore, Beijing and New York.

Standard Chartered has consolidated the majority of its business operations in Singapore into two new locations -- at Marina Bay Financial Center where the bank has its trading floor, the largest in Asia with 790 seats spanning over 65,000 square feet across three floors, and at Changi Business Park, which is a key location for the bank's Group Technology and Operations function. The consolidation strategy was the catalyst for the bank's decision to deploy a Juniper Networks' campus network solution, which includes the Juniper Networks EX Series Ethernet Switches, SRX Series Services Gateways and the management system NSM Central Manager.

Based on successful implementations in Singapore, Standard Chartered deployed similar systems at new sites in New York and Beijing.

Standard Chartered is utilizing Juniper's Virtual Chassis fabric technology, which enables up to 10 interconnected EX4200 switches to operate as a single, logical device, to grow its campus networks incrementally without incurring large up-front costs. These network access switches have duplexed uplinks Juniper Networks EX8208 core network switches, which form a 10 Gigabit Ethernet mesh that includes the bank's data center switches: EX8208 switches in Singapore with EX4200 switches deployed to support the Beijing and New York server farms.

The bank has also deployed Juniper Networks SRX1400, SRX3400 and SRX3600 Services Gateways within its campus, branch and data center networks as part of its security capability set. With Junos running as a single operating system on both the switches and gateways, Standard Chartered is able to employ a uniform, centrally-managed security policy framework that reduces complexity, risk and operating costs.

For a bank, system availability is absolutely critical to its operations. With Juniper Networks EX Series Ethernet Switches, Standard Chartered has been able to drive down the cost and complexity of managing its networks in these locations with a highly scalable, simplified, two-layer network architecture that delivers low-latency and is fully redundant down to the access layer.

"Standard Chartered Bank is a tier-one financial institution that depends on its information infrastructure to accommodate growth and maximize revenue," said Douglas Murray, senior vice president, Asia Pacific at Juniper Networks. "We are delighted that the Bank has selected Juniper Networks as a strategic network provider."