Juniper Networks has announced new enhancements to the Juniper Apstra platform that further simplify the deployment, troubleshooting and operations of data centre networks. With the latest Apstra software release, Juniper’s enterprise, service provider and cloud provider customers can now extend Apstra’s intent-based networking capabilities to edge data centres with collapsed fabric topologies. Additionally, customers can utilise Apstra software to enable tighter ‘zero trust’ security with new policy assurance and role-based access control (RBAC) capabilities as well as simplified migration from legacy data centres with new Apstra professional services.
Commenting on development, Mike Bushong, VP, Data Center Product Management, Juniper Networks, said, “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. Apstra uniquely provides a single solution for the design, deployment and operations of data centre networks in multivendor environments, leveraging true intent-based networking to maximise data centre 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.”
Enterprises and service providers are increasingly deploying small data centres at the network edge. New use cases, such as industrial automation and augmented reality, are driving a need to bring data processing closer to the end user to minimise application latency and improve reliability and user experience. Processing data at the edge can save substantial networking costs by eliminating the need to send traffic back to centralised cloud data centres.
To address these trends, Apstra’s edge deployment model supports collapsed fabric topologies, commonly used in smaller, remote edge data centres. With this new model, customers utilise a simple platform to reliably manage intent-based networking and analytics – from small edge data centres to large, centralised sites – using a single source of truth. Extending Apstra to edge data centres allows organisations to benefit from intent-based networking and analytics in smaller deployments that don’t need the scale of a large, centralised data centre.
Juniper’s data centre offering, in conjunction with the company’s Connected Security portfolio, delivers a wide range of protections for the ‘Zero Trust’ data centre, including workload protection, threat intelligence and prevention, unified policy management and network segmentation and isolation at scale. Apstra provides a multitude of security benefits for data centre fabrics, including intent-based policy assurance for consistent and accurate policy enforcement and continuous validation across vendors, easy-to-use blueprints and templates for securing the data centre and robust audit trails.
The latest version of Apstra provides policy assurance to enable granular enforcement where needed for greater scalability and efficiency, connectivity restrictions for multi-tenant environments and a wide array of RBAC and assurance. Apstra can detect security policy conflicts and duplicated rules, alerting users with actionable suggestions for resolution.
Juniper’s new migration services provide a rapid and reliable way for customers to transition from legacy data centre architectures to modern environments that benefit from Apstra’s intent-based networking and assurance.
By leveraging Apstra’s intent-based networking architecture and automation tools, Juniper’s professional services team can perform real-time, preconditioned validations based on the exact blueprints, network models and operating systems. This enables customers to migrate to Apstra with minimal downtime while reducing the capital expenditure (capex) and operational expenditure (opex) associated with physical and virtual testing during migration. In addition, customers can utilize Juniper experts, best practice design methodologies and in-house automation tools to accelerate deployments for a high degree of assurance, increased business agility, accelerated deployments and drastically reduced risk.
Meanwhile, Darko Petrovic, Principal Engineer, Advania, said, “Advania needed to build a new shared infrastructure for its outsourcing business and automation of the data centre 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.”
Also, Ana Montalvo Álvarez, Core Platforms and Network Systems Director, Telefonica Spain, said, “Our new virtualisation 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 centre infrastructure with intent-based management and advanced telemetry on all devices, powering efficient operations and superior control.”
Additionally, David Pritchard, Senior Solutions Architect, SHI, said, “Apstra automates and validates the entire data centre 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.”
Lastly, Brad Casemore, Research Vice President, Data centre and Multicloud Networks, IDC, said, “Juniper’s integration and assimilation of Apstra into the company has allowed for growth and innovation in its data centre portfolio at a time when the need for increased automation in data centre operations has become more pronounced. By extending Apstra’s use cases to edge data centres, organisations 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 organisations overcome significant hurdles in modernizing their data centre infrastructure on-prem and at the edge.”
