Multivendor intent-based management capabilities now extend to edge data centers along with new Zero Trust security policies and professional services that simplify deployment and management

Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR), a leader in secure, AI-driven networks, today announced new enhancements to the Juniper Apstra platform that further simplify the deployment, troubleshooting and operations of data center 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 centers with collapsed fabric topologies. Additionally, customers can utilize 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 centers 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 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.”

Edge data center support assures reliable operations everywhere

Enterprises and service providers are increasingly deploying small data centers 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 minimize 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 centralized cloud data centers.

To address these trends, Apstra’s edge deployment model supports collapsed fabric topologies, commonly used in smaller, remote edge data centers. With this new model, customers utilize a simple platform to reliably manage intent-based networking and analytics – from small edge data centers to large, centralized sites – using a single source of truth. Extending Apstra to edge data centers allows organizations to benefit from intent-based networking and analytics in smaller deployments that don’t need the scale of a large, centralized data center.

Policy assurance provides Zero Trust security across the network

Juniper’s data center offering, in conjunction with the company’s Connected Security portfolio, delivers a wide range of protections for the Zero Trust data center, 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 center 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 center 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 center 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 CapEx and 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.

Supporting Quotes:

“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.”

- Darko Petrovic, Principal Engineer, Advania

“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.”

- Ana Montalvo Álvarez, Core Platforms and Network Systems Director, Telefonica Spain

“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.”

- 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 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.”

- Brad Casemore, Research Vice President, Datacenter and Multicloud Networks, IDC

Additional Resources:

• Launch Blog: The Latest Step in an Amazing Apstra Journey: Reimagining Data Center Operations
• Product & solutions pages:
  • Apstra Product Page
  • Apstra Datasheet
  • Apstra At A Glance
  • Solutions Brief: Apstra for Edge DC
  • Data Center Solutions Page
  • IT Networking Solution Page

About Juniper Networks

Juniper Networks is dedicated to dramatically simplifying network operations and driving superior experiences for end users. Our solutions deliver industry-leading insight, automation, security, and AI to drive real business results. We believe that powering connections will bring us closer together while empowering us all to solve the world’s greatest challenges of well-being, sustainability, and equality. Additional information can be found at Juniper Networks (www.juniper.net) or connect with Juniper on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Juniper Networks, the Juniper Networks logo, Juniper, Junos, and other trademarks listed here are registered trademarks of Juniper Networks, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

category-Data Center

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220315005380/en/