Juniper Apstra Upgraded For Edge Migration
& Zero-Trust
March 15, 2022
Juniper
Networks made 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.
“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
