Internet Pioneer, New Network, New Outlook

Internet pioneer, new network, new outlook.

Deliver premium content better than anyone on the Internet. That was the challenge for internet pioneer, AOL.

As its market share was threatened by major competitors, AOL needed to maintain its popularity as a primary destination.

Determined to make a change, the company proceeded to overhaul its business with the ambitious goal of becoming the unquestioned premiere distributor of web content.

One visit to the AOL site today and you can see that the changes made are real, and the differences are much more than skin deep. They go right to the core of the company—quite literally.

"We basically had the same type of network design that everyone had in the industry for many years," said Jay Moran, Senior Tech Director of Network Engineering at AOL. "[It was] very hierarchal in nature and also very specialised on a per-application basis."

But all that's changed with Juniper's MX960 routers and Junos operating system that now form the heart of AOL's data centre architecture.

"What Juniper's done with the MX960s and Junos has allowed us the flexibility to say, 'Look, we're going to have one network architecture for everything.' The new network architecture, so to speak," added Moran.

It's an improvement also recognised by AOL CTO Alex Gounares. "We have thousands and thousands of routers and switches and other networking devices," he says. "If all these things were managed differently, had different protocols, different operating systems, different ways to do updates, it would be sheer chaos. It would be almost unmanageable."

The infusion of Juniper technology has decreased TCO by reducing operating expenses and enabling consolidation. Because of the newfound ease of management, Juniper is now the backbone of the entire AOL network end-to-end, inbound and outbound, internal to external—everything.

The cost savings are real, but where AOL really sees a measurable difference is in its user base. Customers are coming back. The AOL network currently handles over 168 million visitors to their sites and is the number two video site on the web.

"Our video site is exploding," says Gounares with a confident smile. And he continues to think big. "Things that matter to us greatly are bandwidth and scale. We're not trying to do things small-fry."

Moran is equally confident, not just about what Juniper is doing for AOL, but for what it could potentially do for other service providers and enterprises looking for a refresh. "With Juniper, lots of different people have different ways of re-architecting their network to allow them to do whatever they want, whenever they want, for whatever product."

Looks like the new AOL—and its new network—are delivering as planned.