Juniper Care Options: Which Hardware Insurance is Right for You?

If you’re deploying Juniper Networks’ solutions on behalf of your customers, think of Juniper Care as a kind of insurance plan. These bundles of support services help to proactively mitigate risks to your customers’ Juniper networks, and they really prove their worth when an issue does occur. However – just like with most insurance packages today – there are a lot of options and add-ons for Juniper Care. In this blog post we’ll explain what Juniper Care offers and how to select the service level that’s right for your customers. 

Prevention and cure 

Every Juniper Care service seeks to achieve the same goal: preventing as many network issues as they can; and fixing those that inevitably slip through as quickly as possible. To that end, all Juniper Care service levels come with the following services: 

Always-on technical aid: Every Juniper Care customer gets unlimited 24/7 phone and online access to the Juniper Networks Technical Assistance Centre (or JTAC): essentially engineers on tap who can help diagnose, troubleshoot, and work around customer network and hardware issues. Juniper Care users can also access the Juniper Support Portal, a self-service gateway to all the latest resources, tools, and info to keep your network in top gear. Think of this as accident and hospitalisation cover, for ill or injured networks. 

Juniper Support Insights: This AI solution supports any Juniper device that uses the Junos OS and does two things. First, it gives IT teams a very in-depth and real-time view of everything happening on their networks. Second, it uses Juniper’s knowledge base to automatically identify (and, where possible, fix) issues that it detects on your network, from security vulnerabilities and hardware defects to end-of-life and contract issues. The result: more uptime, lower admin costs, and smoother operations. This is a big help for stretched IT teams that may need help continuously optimising their networks. 

Constant coverage: Finally, every Juniper Care service level offers access to the latest Juniper software releases and service APIs, as well as the Juniper Software Support Evaluation Tool (or JSSET) that proactively checks for and alerts IT to high-impact defects in installed Junos software. Think of these as wellness supplements and health screenings for your customers’ networks: keeping them in good health so less problems occur. 

 In short, even Juniper Care Core services go a long way towards reducing the risks to customers’ networks; and making the recovery process much faster and more cost-effective if something does go wrong. 

So what else is there? 

In a word: lots. Juniper Care offers a variety of ways to buff its Core services depending on what your customers might need. These service levels fall into three main categories. 

Juniper Care Core Plus: Juniper Care Core Plus offers everything the Juniper Care Core level does, “plus” the option to replace or repair any defective hardware as identified by JTAC engineers. Juniper states that this should happen within 10 business days of them receiving the faulty gear.  

This option is suitable for customers who want extra cover but don’t run mission-critical applications on their networks.

Learn more about Juniper’s Return Merchandise Authorisation (RMA) procedure.

Juniper Care Next-day And Juniper Care Same-day: For businesses in central locations, these service levels speed up replacement parts delivery to minimise any form of downtime.  

• Juniper Care Next-Day Ship ensures replacement parts are shipped the Next Business Day after RMA have been issued by Juniper. Keep in mind that the RMA needs to be approved before 3pm local time, based on where your JTAC is located. Otherwise, you’ll receive delivery on the following business day. For example, if the RMA is approved on Thursday after 3pm, the replacement part will be shipped on Monday.

• Juniper Care Next-Day Delivery functions the same as its shipping counterpart, except parts are guaranteed to be delivered by the Next Business Day. That makes for faster replacement in tight situations.

• Juniper Care Same-Day accelerate this even further, with 4-Hour delivery from the time when the RMA is issued – subject to availability. 

Finally, Juniper Care Next-Day Onsite and Juniper Care Same-Day Onsite add an extra layer of onsite help to their base services. Juniper also sends a technician to assist in swapping defective units with replacements, which proves helpful for remote locations where customers lack onsite personnel to do the physical work. Note that these technicians won’t provide diagnostics, troubleshooting, or other higher-level support; these tasks will usually come after hardware fixes anyway. 

Consult Juniper’s service availability tool to make sure your business is in the coverage area for Juniper Care Next-Day or Juniper Care Same-Day services. 

This option is suitable for highly mission-critical networks where the only acceptable downtime is no time.

A detailed documentation of Juniper Care Services can be found here. 

The best policy 

Juniper Care’s various service levels map primarily to how quickly customers need network hardware issues resolved – which is itself a question of workloads and service level agreements for any individual customer or network site. Those with smaller IT teams, handling higher-criticality network infrastructure, will find the Next-Day and Same-Day levels particularly useful as a force multiplier for their capabilities. It’s worth noting that even Juniper Care’s core services already offer a solid base of network management support and infrastructure protection. As with any insurance, even basic cover can go a long way. 

Get in touch with the Juniper Dicker Data team to discover how to maximise the customer value and growth opportunities that Juniper Care’s service levels can offer.