Juniper has upgraded the software for its NAC gear, making it compatible out of the box with Microsoft's NAC scheme.

The Juniper Unified Access Control (UAC) software is now interoperable with Microsoft’s network access protection (NAP) meaning that customers can use elements of one in conjunction with elements of the other.

Rather than distribute Juniper’s UAC client, the NAP client that comes built into Windows XP and Vista can handle reporting on the status of endpoints. (Compare NAC products)

More than a year ago, Juniper demonstrated this support at Interop, but the company is just now putting it in its UAC platform, making it simpler for customers to take advantage of it.

The company has upgraded the installation tools for its UAC agent to make it as easy as possible. It also makes it possible for auto-remediation to work with more third-party products and making UAC scale to hundreds of thousands of endpoints at a time.

Juniper has also broadened the devices that can send security input to its Infranet Controller (IC), the UAC policy controller, in order to isolate misbehaving endpoints.

The company’s Coordinated Threat Control (CTC) architecture enables various devices on the network to report to the IC about significant security incidents. Based on the severity of these events, IC policies can call for quarantining the offending machine or restricting the access it has to the network. In extreme cases its session can be cut and further access attempts denied until the attack can be analyzed.

Juniper has expanded this reporting capability to include the firewall within its ISG appliance.

Juniper is also announcing two new IC appliances, the IC 4500 and the IC 6500, new hardware that boosts performance of earlier models. IC 4500 costs $10,000 for the appliance plus licenses for concurrent users. The smallest license is for 25 users and costs $1,500. The IC 6500 appliance costs $15,000 plus licenses. The smallest license package is for 100 users and costs $4,300.

The company has added a disaster recovery license for its UAC platform. So when a business has to switch to a backup or mirrored data center, it costs less to license the backup site that it would otherwise cost.

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.