Juniper Networks is discontinuing its DX line of application acceleration boxes. The DX line of hardware does load balancing, offloads the processing from Web servers, and guards against denial-of-service attacks.

There are no additional details of how product support will be winded down at this point. What is known is that Juniper probably regards the DX as insufficiently distinguishable from the competitors’ lineup.

Excerpt from Network World on Juniper’s response to questions related to the DX line:

The strength of Juniper is based on the competitive advantage that we bring to the market coupled with the increasing criticality of high-performance networking to our customers’ business success. Our ability to deliver sustained differentiation is the nexus of the opportunity in front of us.

We remain fully committed to capitalizing on this opportunity. To this end, Juniper has made the formal decision to end-of-life the DX hardware, software and licenses. We will work diligently to continue to support existing customer installations of the DX and successfully transition customers to other application acceleration offerings within our high-performance network infrastructure offerings in the future.

Juniper did not respond directly as to whether there will be layoffs. The official response is: “Every effort is being made to identify new roles for all employees affected by this decision.”