The state of South Carolina’s probation department became a big purchaser of Juniper Networks enterprise products via a predictable route: it was a satisfied customer of NetScreen firewalls, then Juniper bought NetScreen.

After that, as Juniper expanded its enterprise portfolio the state tried out the new Juniper gear in competition with other vendors’ products, and in many cases Juniper came out on top, says David O’Berry, the IT director for South Carolina’s Department of Probation, Parole and Pardon.

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Now the department has a mix of Juniper enterprise equipment including firewalls, routers and intrusion -detection and -prevention platforms. Juniper’s WAN optimization gear will play a key role in rolling out a .NET infrastructure that is now being planned, Berry says.

He doesn’t buy Juniper gear blindly but the company always gets consideration. “I will go with the product that suits the enterprise the best,” he says. But having dealt with the company for five years now, he considers Juniper a trusted vendor in a very small group that also includes Cisco, NetApp, EMC and Dell.

The road to Juniper started in 2002 when the state network’s Network Associates Gauntlet firewall software was maxing out its Sun Enterprise 250 servers. Secure Computing had just bought the Gauntlets and was still working out exact plans for it, O’Berry says.

He looked around and found the NetScreen firewall appliances supported both better throughput and a better price, so he switched to them, and now the state has six deployed at key sites. These include NetScreen 204s, 208s and SSG 500 Series devices.

Two years later, when Juniper was ready to beta test its J-Series routers, O’Berry signed up. The department put the J-4300 through its paces for three months along with Cisco’s 2800 Series routers.

Both routed well, but Juniper’s reputation for security gave it the edge at a time when Cisco was under fire about its unpatched routers being susceptible to buffer-overflow attacks and shell-code exploits. “I'm with a pretty security-conscious group for the most part,” says O’Berry, “so those things had me start looking at other vendors for what we could do routing-wise.”