Juniper Networks Gives Data Center Operations a Boost With a New Software

Highlights

• It will introduce new networking capabilities to edge data centers, bringing smooth and reliable operations everywhere.
• The new Apstra professional services will simplify the migration and deployment process from legacy data centers to modern environments.

Juniper Networks, a leader in secure, AI-driven networks, announced new enhancements to its Juniper Apstra platform. These enhancements will simplify the deployment, troubleshooting, and operations of data center networks. With the release of the new software, Juniper’s enterprise, service provider, and cloud provider customers can extend Apstra’s intent-based networking capabilities to edge data centers with collapsed fabric topologies. Customers can also enable better Zero-trust security with new policy assurance and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) capabilities, plus simplified migration from legacy data centers.

Reliable operations

Enterprises and service providers are deploying small data centers at the network edge. New developments like industrial automation and augmented reality are creating an urge to bring data processing closer to the end-user to minimize application latency and improve user experience and reliability. Edge data processing can save networking costs to a great extent by eliminating the need to send the traffic back to centralized cloud data centers.

Apstra’s edge deployment model supports fabric topologies, commonly used in remote, small edge data centers, to address these trends. The new models help customers utilize a simple platform to manage intent-based networking and analytics – from small edge data centers to large, centralized sites – using a single source of truth.

Security benefits provided by Apstra:

• Intent-based policy assurance for consistent and accurate policy enforcement.
• Continuous validation across vendors.
• Easy-to-use blueprints.
• Templates for security data centers.
• Robust audit trails.
• Greater scalability and efficiency.
• Connectivity restrictions for multi-tenant environments.
• Detects security policy conflicts and duplicate rules.
• Giving users actionable suggestions.

Simplifies deployment and migration

Junipwer’s new migration services have been designed to provide customers with an easy and quick way to transition from legacy data centers to modern infrastructures.

The company’s professional services team can now perform real-time, pre-conditioned validations on their clients’ exact configurations, networking models and operating systems with the help of Apstra’s intent-based networking architecture and automation tools. This new service allows customers to migrate to the latest version of the Apstra platform with minimal downtime while reducing the CapEx and OpEx associated with physical and virtual testing during migration. With the help of Juniper experts, best practice design methodologies and in-house automation tools, customers can speed up deployments for a high degree of assurance, high business agility, accelerated deployments and drastically reduced risk.

Experts’ view

“With the latest enhancements to our Apstra software platform, we are continuing our commitment to putting user and operator experiences at the forefront of everything we do,” said Mike Bushong, VP of Data Center Product Management at Juniper Networks. “Apstra uniquely provides a single solution for the design, deployment and operations of data center networks in multivendor environments, leveraging true intent-based networking to maximize data center reliability with automation and assurance. The newest features enable us to double down on these core architectural differences, bringing reliability, simplicity and security to even more use cases and environments.”

Darko Petrovic, Principal Engineer, Advania said, “Advania needed to build a new shared infrastructure for its outsourcing business and automation of the data center was a critical requirement. Juniper Apstra multi-vendor support provides a single point of management across different vendors, giving us the freedom to innovate and not lock us into one infrastructure vendor. When compared to other solutions, Apstra’s level of automation, provisioning and visibility offers far more capability. Apstra helps us build and maintain a reliable network by ensuring that the operational state of the network is always running as intended. The simplicity of the tool allowed us to achieve excellent time-to-value because the tool was easy to learn and implement.”

Ana Montalvo Álvarez, Core Platforms and Network Systems Director, Telefonica Spain said, “Our new virtualization infrastructure, ‘UNICA Next,’ will be open and highly automated with the inclusion of Juniper Apstra, Contrail and QFX technologies. The new cloud network will provide superior flexibility, agility and scalability to deliver new services. With Apstra and Contrail, we can deliver end-to-end orchestration and automation that allows us to monitor and maintain our data center infrastructure with intent-based management and advanced telemetry on all devices, powering efficient operations and superior control.”

David Pritchard, Senior Solutions Architect, SHI said, “Apstra automates and validates the entire data center network’s operations, eliminating complexity, vulnerabilities and outages to ensure end-to-end reliability. Apstra is a must have tool that can help customers focus more on business outcomes instead of dealing with manual daily tasks.”

Brad Casemore, Research Vice President, Datacenter and Multicloud Networks, IDC said, “Juniper’s integration and assimilation of Apstra into the company has allowed for growth and innovation in its data center portfolio at a time when the need for increased automation in data center operations has become more pronounced. By extending Apstra’s use cases to edge data centers, organizations can design, validate and scale their networks across multiple environments, all with the reliability of automation. Additionally, as the demand for digital infrastructure continues, Apstra’s new migration services address the changing nature of the networking community, helping organizations overcome significant hurdles in modernizing their data center infrastructure on-prem and at the edge.”