Extra tags: Data Centre
Juniper Networks, a leader in secure, AI-driven networks, has introduced new Juniper Apstra platform advancements that make data centre network implementation, troubleshooting, and operations even easier. Juniper's enterprise, service provider, and cloud provider customers may now extend Apstra's intent-based networking capabilities to edge data centres with collapsed fabric topologies with the latest Apstra software version. Apstra software also enables tighter Zero Trust security with enhanced policy assurance and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) features, as well as simpler migration from older data centres with new Apstra professional services.
“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 maximise 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.”
Edge data centre support assures reliable operations everywhere
Small data centres are rapidly being deployed at the network edge by businesses and service providers. To reduce application latency and improve dependability and user experience, new use cases like as industrial automation and augmented reality are pushing the need to bring data processing closer to the end-user. By eliminating the need to transfer traffic back to centralised cloud data centres, processing data at the edge can save significant networking expenses.
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.
Policy assurance provides Zero Trust security across the network
In conjunction with Juniper's Connected Security portfolio, Juniper's data centre offering provides 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 offers a variety 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.
Apstra Professional Services simplify deployment and migration
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.
Juniper's professional services team can do real-time, preconditioned validations based on the specific blueprints, network models, and operating systems by leveraging Apstra's intent-based networking architecture and automation technologies. Customers can move to Apstra with less downtime and lower CapEx and OpEx associated with physical and virtual testing throughout the transition. Customers can also employ Juniper specialists, best practice design techniques, and in-house automation technologies to expedite installations, resulting in higher assurance, better business agility, faster deployments, and lower risk.
Supporting Quotes:
“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.”
− Darko Petrovic, Principal Engineer, Advania
“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.”
− Ana Montalvo Álvarez, Core Platforms and Network Systems Director, Telefonica Spain
“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.”
− David Pritchard, Senior Solutions Architect, SHI
“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 modernising their data centre infrastructure on-prem and at the edge.”
− Brad Casemore, Research Vice President, Datacenter and Multicloud Networks, IDC
