Juniper Networks today announced the “Mist-ification” of 128 Technology’s Session Smart SD-WAN, its SRX series branch gateways, and the introduction of a new EX series secure access switch.

This is the latest instance of Juniper extending its Mist artificial intelligence operations (AIOps) capabilities to the rest of its portfolio. Since acquiring the wireless and LAN switching company in 2019 for $405 million, a growing number of products including Juniper’s routers and switches have found themselves under the Mist umbrella.

The newest product to get the Mist treatment is 128 Technology’s Session Smart SD-WAN, which Juniper acquired last fall for $450 million.

Unlike most SD-WAN vendors, which rely heavily on IPsec tunnels for their overlays, 128 Technology embeds metadata into the first packet to establish a session.

According to Sue Graham Johnston, former 128 Technology president and VP and GM of Juniper’s AI-driven WAN, this approach to routing has several advantages including greater visibility of traffic moving across the WAN.

“We innovated in routing rather than just building a tunneled overlay,” she said. “The session is what gives you the granularity and the insight into what is going on with your unique user experience.”

This visibility and the wealth of telemetry data that goes along with it made 128 Technology’s session-based SD-WAN an ideal fit for Mist, she added. “With that session orientation, you get tremendous visibility into the user experience that with [Mist’s] AI-driven engine you can act on.”

The company’s SD-WAN offering is now fully integrated with Juniper’s WAN Assurance and Marvis virtual network assistant. The company claims the integration will allow customers to ingest telemetry data from Session Smart routers into Mist’s AIOps engine in order to detect and remediate anomalies and fast track root cause analysis.

In many cases, Juniper claims that Marvis, the company’s AI networking chatbot, is able to notify customers and suggest remediation steps or further troubleshooting based on available data.

If, for example, a Microsoft Teams call went down, the end user wouldn’t know if it was a problem with their WiFi, their LAN, their modem, or if it's at the WAN, explained Jeff Aaron, head of marketing at Mist. “We can correlate all that information and help get to that root cause even quicker.”

128 Technology isn’t the only platform getting the Mist treatment. Juniper extended its Mist zero-touch provisioning capabilities to its SRX series of branch gateways. SRX gateways can now be provisioned from the same interface as the rest of the company’s Mist wireless access points and switches.

The same is also true of Juniper’s new EX4400 secure access switch. Juniper claims the switches are ideal in environments with complex switch fabrics ranging from the data center to the campus. The EX4400 boasts support for media access control security (MACsec) encryption using standard AES 256-bit algorithms and group policy-based micro-segmentation.

And like 128 Technology's Session Smart SD-WAN, both Juniper's routers and switches also contribute telemetry to the Mist AIOps engine for analysis.