Juniper Session Smart Router Reviews

We are using it as a DNG. This means all subscriber PPPoE sessions or ILS Smart VPN connections are terminated through the access network to this BNG, Uniphore BNG. From there, they are managed.

Everything has been fine. Although we did not explore much about the solution, they provided us with a customized product according to our requirements. It was very well executed.

I did not find any problem with Juniper. Regarding improvement, we still need to see what it can do.

I have used Juniper for around five years.

We have a limited edition, so we did not use much of the resource capacity. We have our licenses only for the limited edition, and we did not address that yet. As and when licenses are included, we think it will improve scalability.

Customer service is very prompt.

The installation took around three days. I managed the deployment, and the delay was only due to physical arrangements.

Each installation per area or per field or per session involves around two people.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate the solution nine.

We use Juniper Session Smart Router to streamline and automate our operations across nearly 3,000 global branches.

We replaced outdated routers with a more flexible and automated design, involving access and channel boxes at the network edge. These routers efficiently handle point-of-sale and online transactions, automatically balancing the load and routing traffic based on available bandwidth. Our goal is to eliminate manual configuration, allowing the devices to smartly filter and route various types of data traffic. This upgrade ensures our network is more responsive, handling transactions seamlessly and optimizing overall performance.

The most valuable feature of Juniper Session Smart Router is its unique SDR channel. Unlike other SD-WAN solutions using IPsec, Juniper sends secure IP packets without adding extra headers, saving bandwidth. This unique approach ensures a secure connection from our stores to the data center, all within Juniper devices. There is no unnecessary overhead for bulk traffic.

Juniper Session Smart Router could be better in terms of software performance. Sometimes, there are glitches, especially with MTU issues that affect application communication, although this seems to be a common problem across various SD-WAN solutions, not just Juniper. Another thing that could be improved is the setup process. It would be great if configuring the SSR could be simpler, like making firmware updates to the 128 version without the need for complex linking with interfaces. Also, reducing the delay in reflecting interface changes on the GUI would make the user experience smoother.

I have been working with Juniper Session Smart Router for almost four years.

The stability of Juniper Session Smart Router has been a bit inconsistent. While issues do crop up regularly, I wouldn't solely blame the box itself. It seems like the lack of robust support is hindering the device from reaching its full potential. For instance, in a recent MTA issue, we were advised to upgrade to a new version, only to discover another bug that hampers the device's performance in a mixed environment. Overall, I would rate the stability at a six out of ten.

I would rate the scalability as a nine out of ten. It is quite scalable. In our organization, we use Juniper Session Smart Router across 4,000 sites, totaling around 40,000 users when considering redundancy.

I would rate Juniper's support team as a five out of ten. In comparison to other support teams I have worked with, they could improve. Many engineers, including those with several years of experience, find the support lacking in expertise. The team often relies on generic information from guides and searches, rather than providing specific solutions to the problem at hand. It seems like they might need better training or a more efficient process to address issues promptly. Overall, it takes them some time to get to the root of the problem, which can be frustrating.

Neutral

The initial setup of this router is a bit complex even for experienced engineers. It runs on Linux and requires extra steps for configuration. The blasting process, where you load the software, often gets stuck, and we end up doing it a few times. It is not very reliable, and even Juniper tech support hasn't given a clear fix. Both the setup steps and software stability can be a bit of a hassle. Deploying Juniper Session Smart Router takes some time. After all the planning and documentation are done, it usually takes more than a week or around ten days to get the connector set up on our on-premises data center.

Juniper Session Smart Router is not significantly cheaper than, for example, Cisco.

My advice for others considering Juniper Session Smart Router is to improve the GUI-based management. Right now, it heavily relies on CLI, which can be less reliable and time-consuming. Overall, I would rate Juniper Session Smart Router as an eight out of ten. While it has some good new features, the overall performance could be better.

We are a direct partner of formerly 128T, which is now Juniper. For Juniper, we are currently working on the correct partner status, which is missing due to the purchase of 128T.

As a German ISP, we use SSRs to produce SD-WAN deployments for our customers for plenty of different use cases, such as inter-location connectivity, over bandwidth bundling, and application SLA requirements where some applications get threaded differently against each other. So, it depends on the customer, but we are currently using it for all of the use cases for which you can use SSR.

As compared to the other major vendors in the SD-WAN market, such as VeloCloud, Cisco, and others, the tunnel-free and secure vector routing technology is its major USP, which gives plenty of room to discuss with the customer why IPSec from 1998 is a bit outdated.

The UI of the SSR conductor is the main part where improvements can be done. Today, for every configuration step, you have to do a series of clicks. What we are missing there are wizards. For example, I have two applications, and I want one application to be prioritized against the other. In such a case, a wizard for assigning policies to a service without configuring each step by hand would be very helpful. There should be an overhaul of the GUI of the conductor. The functionality they have got in the Mist portal should be baked into the conductor itself. It would be really great, but as we all know, that won't happen. 

Besides that, there are so many things we are discussing with the engineers and the product management of 128T or Juniper. I'm pretty sure that every feature that will come in the next half-year or three-quarters of a year would be influenced directly by us.

We have been using the Session Smart Router solution for about five years, which is way before it was bought by Juniper. So, we directly started with 128T.

The stability is quite good for the General Available (GA) releases. We didn't have any problems. We also have some customers running the Limited Available (LA) versions because some features are still missing in the GA releases. The LA releases are obviously not as much tested as the GA releases. So, stability is sometimes an issue, but we are working on that currently.

We count our customers based on locations or sites. Our biggest customer has about 1,800 sites, and the next one has about 1,500 sites. Each site might have 200 to 500 users. Generally, performance-wise, a conductor can handle about 1,000 sites. Beyond that, it gets a bit hard.

Because we are talking directly to engineers in the US, the support is usually the best you can possibly get. As a direct 128T partner, we don't count as a normal customer. So, for us, the support is perfect and fine, and we can talk to the engineers directly in Boston. Support is not a problem. I don't know about their normal technical support because we just don't really use it.

We didn't use any other solution previously.

For us, it's pretty much straightforward because we have been working with it for so long. We attended all the classes that 128T provided. So, for us, it's pretty much straightforward, but for a customer who doesn't have experience with any SD-WAN solution, especially not with the 128T solution, it would be fairly complex.

In terms of its maintenance, as an ISP, we have operators who handle more or less traditional routers that we have in our network. They also got trained on this SSR solution, and they can handle these too. Obviously, if you add more routers to your network, you more or less would need more staff to handle them, but there is no specific need just because you are using SSR.

We are currently renegotiating the offer for the licenses and the license bundle model. The license for an ISP has to be different from the license for an end customer. This is something we are currently renegotiating with Juniper, but, of course, the pricing for the licensing is always an issue when you want to get more customers.

Juniper has just introduced a three-tier license model based on just routing, more or less features on top, and the full feature set. Therefore, the prices for the different tiers of licenses differ from each other. For the top license, I'd rate it a three to five out of five. It depends on the amount of discount you got. A customer with 2,000 sites would get more discounts than a customer with three sites. For the limited functionality tier, I'd rate them a bit lower because they limit the functionality we need. So, we don't buy these licenses. For the limited functionality, in my personal opinion, they are a bit expensive.

When we started monitoring the SD-WAN market, we checked the obvious participants there, such as VeloCloud, and we decided to use 128T as our main and only SD-WAN.

My advice to anyone who wants to use this solution is to read the menu. Every customer who directly wants to administer and operate an SSR solution should obviously get in touch with a Juniper partner to get it set up right from the start of the project. That's because, with the configuration itself, there are so many things you have to keep in mind when moving on from MPLS or VPN to an SD-WAN solution. It isn't directly related to the SSR component, but it is related to switching over to an SD-WAN solution.

I would rate Juniper Session Smart Router an eight out of 10.

We deploy the solution on UCPs. The solution is used for the edge and can be used for Vista, low bandwidth links, session failover, or smooth session failovers, and can be deployed on public clouds. Juniper Session Smart Router can save up to thirty percent of bandwidth and database usage.

The solution is especially Session's smart, application-aware, AI-based. It has artificial intelligence and AI ops interface through Mist Cloud. Juniper Session Smart Router is a complete edge-to-cloud stack, with an access point. We can have a complete stack built around Juniper SD-WAN, switches, Wi-Fi, and the cloud. This complete stack can scale up from small branches to large, hundred-gig deployments.

Juniper Session Smart Router can improve the integration for Wi-Fi devices and add additional Sassy deployments.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is extremely stable.

The solution is highly scalable by default zero ZTNAs built into the product.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The licensing is straightforward and not per device. It is a simple bandwidth-based license and the orchestration comes bundled with the solution by default. We can add additional features if we wish; for example, if we want a cloud-based controller, there are certain licenses available. It is quite simple. I understand that it can be deployed on cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and GCP.

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

Depending on the use case, whether we are in retail, banking, IT, or manufacturing, the deployments may differ depending on if we are on a digitization journey or moving workloads to the cloud. This solution is very good because it is scalable across all use cases, saving 30 percent of the bandwidth in its transport diagnostic and database. The solution is session-aware, rather than relying on external-based technology, so everything is seen as a session. We can run our SLA metrics on the session, rather than per source to destination, providing complete visibility of the session. Juniper Session Smart Router is also big in zero trust access. All in all, whatever we need is available, with a single pane of glass to see all the features. This makes it a great solution and it is easy to deploy, with both cloud-based environments and on-prem orchestration available.