Kicking off Mobility Field Day, Juniper Mist brought the thunder of Marvis’ cute little plushie face, MINI style. The world learned of Mist Wireless at Mobility Field Day, and MFD continues to be where new Junipery things are announced. MFD11 did not disappoint on that front. They also expanded upon what they announced at MFD11, at their own event in Las Vegas, at #AINativeNow. I was privileged to get front row seats to both events.
Juniper’s announcements of what’s new came at us fast and quick. One more thing and one more thing. I’ve been a big fan of Mist and then Juniper Mist for years. Long time readers of this blog have seen me use Juniper Mist APs for testing eduroam and other Wifi experiments. I recently got included in Juniper’s Mistfits user group, and I’m excited to see and test these newly announced features I’ll talk about in a moment.
At both events, Juniper made sure to put on an exclamation point that “Up is not the same as good” when it comes to networking!
“But connectivity is not the same as experiencing a great connection”
Jean English, Juniper CMO and SVP
That is why Juniper is talking about being AI Native and not just building AI on to clunky old equipment. They started with the concept of being cloud native and now are focusing on being AI Native. Both are marketing terms, but there is some strength to what they preach. Both events showcased how Juniper is pushing for improvements to the user experience and great connections compared to just connectivity. If a great connection is not provided, AI is there to help network administrators know about it, improve the mean time to resolution, and restore that great connection to end users, who do not care about the network unless it is not working great.
Juniper provided updates on how they are achieving that from several angles starting from Marvis Minis through their Wifi product lines then into their switching, routing, and SD-WAN. Mobility Field Day largely focused on the Wifi line although they made a few switching announcements, but AI Native Now was full stack focused.
Marvis Minis
For those not living in the Juniper world, Marvis Minis are the next iteration of Marvis. Mist has always been at the forefront of AI, and Minis brings the next step of that transformation through Digital Twins. Marvis is cloning itself into mini versions that run along side your existing network virtually.
The minis do the hard work, looking for issues, before those issues can arise in the real world. Currently Minis virtually test different things, such as DHCP response, ARP times, DNS, and specific applications. If anything fails, Minis can alert people to issues before they surface in the real world.
At Mobility Field Day, Juniper announced some new features for Minis. Largely, the announcements were expansions of Minis to new places. As Mist has done many times over the years, they start with their Wifi product line then expand into Juniper’s switching, routing, and SD-WAN products. At MFD11, Juniper announced that Marvis Minis were expanding to Juniper switches like the rest of Marvis. At AI Native Now, Juniper announced that Minis were expanding to the routing and SD-WAN as well. Marvis Minis will soon be supporting the full stack of Juniper products.
At MFD, Juniper said that Marvis Minis prepares your network for pre-connection and post-connection troubleshooting. Because of the digital twin, you can know of issues that exist BEFORE a client connects. That is something, we have only been able to guess about in the past.
Check out the details in the Tech Field Day presentation video.
Dynamic Spectrum Capture
Another headlining feature announced at Mobility Field Day, and expanded upon at AI Native Now, is Dynamic Spectrum Capture. For several years, Juniper has had the ability to save the Packet Captures of troubled connections for troubleshooting Layer 2 issues. This removes the need to reproduce the problem or wait for it to happen again, because it is automatically logged. You get the PCAPs as it happened. Announced at MFD and expanded upon at AI Native Now, Juniper also announced that they are bringing Dynamic Packet Captures on switching.
The bigger announcement was about Dynamic Spectrum Capture. With the use of the extra scanning radio, Juniper can now do a live Spectrum Capture that is saved for later viewing.
This operates at Layer 1. You get a physical view of the spectrum when there are issues just like Dynamic Packet Captures. You now have both Layer 1 and Layer 2 captures of an incident that you don’t have to recreate or wait for it to happen again. This is super cool!
Automatic AP Placement
Wes Purvis talked about Juniper’s ability to automatically place APs on a map with a few anchor APs. This was already available, but I was unaware of it. During the presentation, I ran the update on my home lab network and it success placed the APs in my house. This is so helpful to ensure that APs are positioned appropriately on a map. If you are doing location services using Wifi or BLE, accurate positions of APs is a must.
This become an even bigger deal when you talk about Juniper’s next announcement, their 2-way tie in with Hamina Wireless’ tools.
Integration with Hamina
The best part of the whole presentation was when they invited Jussi from Hamina into the room via Zoom. Using API calls, you will soon be able to have 2-way integration between Juniper Mist and Hamina. APs that are located in the real world with Automatic AP placement, will be able to be positioned correctly in a Hamina live design.
Hamina can pull statistics from Juniper Mist and display live data on their mapping software. Through this integration, you can visualize live data on a map. Mist has had the ability to show where clients are on a map, now we can determine signal data live on that map. There are questions about if this is killing the need to do site surveys.
So Much More
There are so many more things that were announced at Mobility Field Day and AI Native Now. Juniper really has been innovating and pushing their products to new levels. If you work in the Juniper world, I high recommend you watch the videos from MFD11. Details about Wifi 7, 6GHz, Standard Power, AFC, Juniper NAC, Zoom and Teams Integration, Indoor Location, and so much more. It really was a sight to behold to be the delegate in the room for Mobility Field Day 11 then once again two weeks later at AI Native Now.
While attending AI Native Now in Las Vegas, Mohammed Ali (Ali) and I got together and discussed some of our thoughts on what Juniper discussed at Mobility Field Day, and what we were expecting the next day at AI Native Now.
As a quick aside, Check out our new YouTube channel and website, TowersEdge.net, where we will be discussing Wifi and Private Cellular at the Edge of the network.
Juniper is creating products that are and will continue to be envied and copied. It started with AI and has moved to scanning radios (Ubiquiti quickly announced they were implementing similar dynamic spectrum capture soon after MFD11 using their new scanning radio), others will move to Digital Twins, and everything above will probably have their own version at competitors soon enough.
As Oscar Wilde famously said, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” That just shows how Juniper Mist is in front of the competition.. leading the pack. Their position on the Gartner Magic Quadrant and the fact HPE is in process of acquiring all of Juniper for $14 Billion, they must be doing something right. I hope the upcoming changes that Juniper and HPE can’t talk about yet won’t slow that momentum and innovative spirit.
