Bangalore: Juniper Networks has announced that it has doubled the size of its research and development center in Bangalore. The center, which has occupied a second building at the Embassy Prime and Bagmane Tech Park, now has capacity for over 1200 staff.

The expansion, to over 250,000 square feet of floor-space, comes five years after the R&D centre first began operations with a staff of 30 engineers. Today, 900 engineers and support staff are based there, using 750 racks of equipment and a laboratory boasting system, interoperability, solution, scale, and performance test beds.

"The Bangalore facility is now Juniper?s largest R&D center outside the U.S. and it continues to grow rapidly as the company invests in R&D," said Sridhar Sarathy, managing director for India operations. "A quarter of Juniper's engineers are based here, and they contribute to all stages of product development and to all product lines," he added.

Tasked with researching and testing systems for Juniper's entire portfolio, the Bangalore team has capabilities for product design and development, technical documentation and support, and the full spectrum of engineering work ? hardware, software, testing, customer support, program management and product management.

A dedicated team, which started work in June 2006 and contributed significantly to the EX-series of Ethernet switches launched in January this year, is also based in the Bangalore facility.