OTANIEMI, FINLAND – Juniper Networks announced today that Scientific Computing Ltd. (CSC), the Finnish IT center for science, is deploying Juniper Networks M-series routers in Funet, the Finnish University and Research Network. CSC is a center for high-performance computing and networking owned by the Ministry of Education. In this capacity, CSC maintains the Funet network and provides researchers with the widest selection of scientific software and databases and the most powerful supercomputing environment available in Finland. Funet interlinks more than 80 Finnish research organizations and approximately 200,000 users. CSC global connectivity is provided through the pan-Nordic NORDUnet network. "Aside from providing universities, polytechnics and other organizations linked to the Funet network with increased connection speeds, Juniper Networks routers were selected for its high availability while being able to support numerous concurrent Internet Protocol (IP) services. We can now classify IP traffic without impacting the network's performance," said Juha Oinonen, CSC's development manager who is responsible for the Funet network technology. CSC has selected Juniper Networks M10 and M20 Internet routers to upgrade 13 points of presence to connection speeds of 622 Mbps (OC-12/STM-4). The powerful new Juniper Networks routers in the Funet network are an addition to the M20 routers deployed when the Funet OC-48/STM-16 core backbone was built in 2001. "In addition, Juniper Networks routers offer CSC the opportunity to simultaneously use both Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and IPv4 technologies within the edge and core portions of the network. We trusted Juniper Networks to deliver consistent, trustworthy JUNOS Internet software for feature consistency without any negative performance impact," added Oinonen. Ericsson, Juniper Networks global distribution partner, will supply the routers and connectivity for the Funet network; Sonera, a Juniper Networks customer, will provide support and maintenance for the network.