Cisco competitor Juniper Networks had a couple of updates in the past 48 hours. First of all, 15 routers made by the continuously growing networking company got certified by the U.S. Department of Defense Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC). These routers now belong to the Unified Capabilities Approved Product List (UC APL), which means they can be deployed d by the various military services to carry video and data communications.

“This most recent certification from the JITC includes Juniper Networks® J Series Services Routers, SRX Series Services Gateways, M Series Routers and MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers.”

The JITC interoperability testing and certification are required by the DoD for all real-time networking devices put used in the sector, and the certification of 15 of Juniper’ routers represents a huge milestone for the company. Juniper can now tap a fairly large market in the public sector.

Moving on to the second update from the networking company, Alex Gray, senior vice president and general manager of the campus and branch networking division at Juniper, spoke at the Interop conference. He said that the exponential growth in traffic and virtual resources requires companies like Verizon and Amazon to build an “exponential data center” to keep up with the pace. According to Gray, the network is the only part of the modern datacenter that have not yet become a part of the cloud, and needs to accomplish this by leveraging flat fabrics that enable any-to-any connectivity, such as Juniper’s QFabric Ethernet fabric.

Also at the Interop 2011 conference, Abner Germanow, Juniper’s director of enterprise market highlighted that QFabric is actually a giant switch, and outlined how massively expanding this concept equals cuts the number of network hops needed, and consequently reduces latency.

Juniper competitor EMC also had some big news lately, coming straight from EMC World 2011. This especially true for Greenplum, an EMC company focusing on open-source big data analytics software. EMC acquired the former last year, and indeed, Greenplum seems to be on a way to becoming a serious factor in the storage & networking giant’s plans for the future.