Dell today said it’s agreed to resell gear from Juniper Networks as the Round Rock, Texas, computer maker attempts to fill the networking hole in its product line. It signed a similar agreement with Brocade in August in the face of an onslaught of competition around unified computing systems (UCS) ignited by Cisco’s launch of its own brand of servers in the spring. HP, with its line of networking gear, is similarly forcing Dell to think outside the server box.

As enterprises adopted server virtualization, it had the unintended side effect of clogging up the network, which these UCS products are now trying to solve through what Om calls a comm-puting strategy. Under the terms of its agreement with Juniper, Dell will resell that company’s MX Series services routers, EX Series Ethernet switches and SRX Series services gateways, all running Juniper’s Junos software. The companies also plan to use the existing Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) standard and the iSCSI storage networking standard for their products. This is in contrast to Cisco, which is promoting the Fibre Channel over Ethernet standard for storage area networks with its own servers.