Customer Success Story

America’s Test Kitchen Cooks Up a Radically Simpler Data Center Network

Fueled by consumers’ rising interest in at-home cooking, America’s Test Kitchen has a fast-growing media business, which includes popular television shows, magazines, websites, books, and an online cooking school. To support growth and expansion at scale, America’s Test Kitchen built a brand-new IT infrastructure.

Company	America's Test Kitchen
Industry	Media and Entertainment
Products used	QFX Series, QFX5100, EX4300, SRX1500, Advanced Threat Prevention, Security Director, Wireless Access Points
Region	Americas

Customer Success At-a-glance

Business with a high-performance, scalable foundation

Cybersecurity with integrated protection

End-to-end visibility and simplified network operations

Challenge

For more than two decades, people have relied on America’s Test Kitchen to create beautiful, delicious food without tripping up on complicated techniques or having to scour stores for hard-to-find ingredients. The media company moved from a nondescript brownstone in Brookline, Mass. to Boston’s trendy Seaport district, where it occupies a stunning space in the Innovation & Design Building—perfect for an operation that’s part working commercial kitchen, part television studio, and part office.

The move to Seaport presented Dustin Brandt, director of IT at America’s Test Kitchen, with a rare opportunity: Build a brand-new IT infrastructure that would support the media company’s growth and expansion. “We started with a blank slate,” Brandt says.

To meet the demands of this success and refresh its data center, the media company is fueling its expansion with Juniper Networks data center networking and security solutions.

Solution

America’s Test Kitchen deployed a Juniper-based network at its headquarters and in its data center, anchored by the Juniper Networks QFX5100 Switch and the EX4300 Ethernet Switch. The powerful simplicity and scalability of the Juniper data center fabric deliver operational efficiency, which is critical for this fast-growing media business. Simplifying its data center architecture also lays the groundwork for a multicloud future.

Broadcast TV and magazine production mean uploading, editing, and moving high-definition video and huge image files. The America’s Test Kitchen network is designed for such heavy-duty media usage and is primed for the industry’s inevitable shift to ultra-high definition video. The network powers everything from television production and magazines to books, web content, and administrative operations.

Centralized event monitoring and policy management with Juniper Sky Advanced Threat Prevention and Juniper Networks Junos Space Security Director enable real-time threat protection and segregation. Juniper Networks SRX1500 Services Gateway provides advanced security services, including content security and unified threat management. Juniper Sky ATP provides advanced malware protection from the cloud, securing data center workloads and protecting employees against cyberattacks wherever they reside.

Having security integrated into the network was critical for America’s Test Kitchen to simplify security operations while mitigating the risk of disruption to its shows, websites, and other media resources and to protect its intellectual property. “We need to be smart, lean, and efficient,” says Brandt.

The IT team can manage the network, both physical and virtual, through a single pane of glass using Juniper Networks Junos Space Network Director. “Between the Junos OS command line and Junos Space, we have a window into the operation of the network that we didn’t have before,” he says.

Outcome

“It has been a seamless transition to Juniper,” Brandt says. “The real achievement is that during this entire operation, the end users didn’t know anything about the changes.” Users—everyone from chefs to administrative assistants—left the office on a Thursday; when they returned the following Monday, everything was ready. “They sat down at their desks, and it was as if nothing had changed. We had zero downtime from an IT standpoint. We did a lot of planning, and thanks to the ease of use of Juniper and the support from our consultant, Integra Networks, everything ran smoothly.”

“We are doing things that we could never have accomplished before Juniper. We centralized management of our entire network, which is located across several facilities, and reduced administrative overhead due to a consistent network operating system, management commands, and management user interfaces.”

America’s Test Kitchen is already onboard Holland Cruise Lines, where guests can watch live cooking shows and master new skills. It’s launching America’s Test Kitchen Kids, a line of books that will range from board books with pictures of baby’s first food to STEM-based picture books to cookbooks. Through it all, America’s Test Kitchen can be confident that its network infrastructure will remain agile.

“As our needs change, we have a solid foundation to build out faster services, support different content types, and move that content around to different delivery channels,” says Brandt. “Juniper has been a great improvement for us.”

"As our needs change, we have a solid foundation to build out faster services, support different content types, and move that content around to different delivery channels. Juniper has been a great improvement for us."

Dustin Brandt Director of IT, America’s Test Kitchen

Watch now

Testimonial from Dustin Brandt, the Director of IT at America's Test Kitchen on why it is important for his company to keep the network and intellectual property safe and secure and how they have done that with Juniper's SRX Firewalls and SkyATP.

The Products

Product

QFX5100

The QFX5100 line of top-of-rack 10/40GbE switches for the data center offers low latency, deployment versatility, and rich automation features. These switches provide universal building blocks for industry-standard architectures such as spine-and-leaf fabrics.