Dealing with the kind of high-performance customer that demands a high level of security, Web hosting provider Peer 1 (peer1.net) signed an agreement last week with IT security solution provider Juniper (juniper.net) to accommodate their needs.

PEER 1 has expanded its product line to offer Juniper Networks Secure Services Gateways, which will help PEER 1 deliver a more secure environment for applications.

Prior to the managed firewall offerings expansion, PEER 1 offered firewall security appliances from NetScreen, which Juniper acquired in February 2004.

"Ever since that purchase they've been looking to take that technology to the next level under the Juniper brand," says Tim Varma, director of product management at PEER 1. "The new line came out last fall, and it's a natural progression, since we've already have had so much success with NetScreen, to just keep on moving forward with Juniper. It's a really good solution for our customers and it's just been a great product."

The Juniper Networks SSG platforms are entirely managed by PEER 1 staff, and enable the company to offer cost-effective, high-capacity security solutions that scale to meet the demands of the largest enterprises.

The company will continue to run its old firewalls alongside the new ones, says Varma, with the new appliances adding many new benefits, including increased session and interface capacity to protect against increasingly sophisticated and frequent threats.

"Customers were asking for an increased numbers of sessions," says Varma. "And the difficulty in the past was going from a lower session model to a higher session model. The discrepancy in place would sometimes be difficult to overcome, so this helps fill those gaps as well. And as the customer grows, they don't have to double their costs. It will just be incremental costs as they grow with us."

PEER 1 will offer three versions of the SSG product: SSG-5, SSG-5 Extended and the SSG-140, with prices ranging from $99 to more than $500.

The SSG 5 and SSG-5 Extended are intended for small branch offices, remote offices, retail outlets and fixed telecommuters, says Juniper. The SSG-140, on the other hand, is a higher performing firewall solution designed for medium to large branch offices and stand-alone medium enterprises.

The Juniper Networks SSG appliances can be customized to match a customer's specific security needs by offering various scale options to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes, says Varma.

"This also allows us, from a managed hosting perspective, to keep a standard for rules set tools," he says. "And at the end of the day, using the Juniper line makes us more efficient because the code, regardless of the appliance, is always going to be the same. We also get pretty high visibility in the Juniper too."