Juniper Networks is pushing an open architecture that provides enhanced visibility and control to help enterprises tackle network security issues.

The company has pulled the covers off a number of new upgrades as well as the brand new SRX 3000 Series Services Gateways, which is essentially a slimmed down version of the SRX 5000 line.

Among the upgrades included in the Network Adaptive Threat Management Solutions set are updated releases of several products: Unified Access Control 3.0, new Secure Access SSL VPN 6.4 technology and new releases of Security Threat Manager 2008.3 and Network and Security Manager 2008.2 with advanced network management, threat response and reporting.

“The key to the functionality we are introducing across all the products is really focused on how do we tie our products together better…they don’t act in silos,” said Sanjay Beri, vice president of Access Solutions at Juniper. “They work together; they share information dynamically, such as identity and application data, so that they can actually combat threats in a better way.”

“The other big focus is around ensuring we do this in an open matter, such that you can plug in third-party vendors and operate in heterogeneous environments,” Beri said. Obviously we know our customers have multivendor environments and our partners sell multiple products, so we want to make sure [that] we are a big proponent of enabling that environment and not make it worse by locking anybody in.”

The SRX3600 enables a no-compromise 10 GE network environment that can support 30 Gbps of stateful firewall, up to 10 Gbps of VPN, 10 Gbps of IPS and 175,000 new connections per second. The SRX3400 platform can support 20 Gbps of stateful firewall, up to 6 Gbps of VPN, 6 Gbps of IPS and 175,000 new connections per second. Both platforms are based on mid-plane design, which enables more flexibility than other units of similar size, company officials said.

Lowering the total cost of ownership and increasing the productivity of network security solutions was also a big piece of Juniper’s pitch around Juniper Network Adaptive Threat Management Solutions. With the flexibility of the SRX Series modular hardware and natively integrated services, Juniper contended enterprises can cut costs by saving power consumption and rack space.

On the productivity side, using Juniper’s NSM 2008.2 and STRM 2008.3, organizations can automate and correlate attack responses to increase IT productivity with universal network and security management that improves deployment time and simplifies network correlation and reporting, officials said. Juniper’s UAC also now supports the IF-MAP protocol, allowing dynamic data interchange between a variety of networking and security components from different vendors.

“Implementation of IT security today requires intelligent solutions that can coordinate across multiple devices, correlate threats from the edge to the core and adapt in real-time,” said Jeff Wilson of Infonetics Research, in a statement. “Juniper’s Adaptive Threat Management solutions provide a combination of improved security, decreased cost of ownership, strong security administration tools and automation of common IT tasks; these solutions can help free up resources for businesses to become more agile and focus on innovation, a powerful advantage in these uncertain times.”