eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Juniper Networks officials this week are expanding the company’s multi-cloud strategy with an array of hardware, software and services offerings that are designed to give businesses the throughput, automation and security they need to run workloads in on-premises data centers and in multiple public cloud environments.
The broad range of network offerings touch on everything from the data center and campus networks to branch offices and the public cloud, creating what officials said is the infrastructure foundation as companies move more of their applications and data to the cloud.
They come with the understanding that enterprises are rapidly embracing not only a hybrid cloud environment—with workloads running in both the cloud and in data centers—but in multi-cloud situations, where they are using more than one cloud. It’s an issue that other network system vendors such as Cisco Systems and F5 Networks are looking to address with integrated technologies that enable greater automation, flexibility, agility and ease of use.
“If multicloud is the destination, then we come to terms with the fact that we are entering an even more complex operating environment—a patchwork of domains across which workloads need to be distributed and orchestrated,” Juniper CTO Bikash Koley wrote in a post on the company blog.
“The answer for handling edge policy and overlays has historically been to build an overlay that has very little resemblance to the actual underlay and then to manage each independently. If complexity is the enemy, turning one management domain into two might simplify policy and control, but it does so at the expense of increased complexity. We believe that the underlay and overlay should to be controlled as one.”
Juniper officials pointed to a recent study by PwC that the vendor commissioned that indicated that most enterprise workloads that currently run on-premises will migrate to the public cloud within the next three years. PwC researchers in the report talked about a “tectonic disruption in enterprise business models, which is forcing organizations to change how they operate in a digital economy. Enterprise boundaries have extended to the edge—where both data and users reside and multiple clouds converge.”
In the data center, Juniper officials introduced a universal switch that can be used for the data center spine, the network edge and the data center interconnect. The QFX10002-60C switch includes 60 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports. At the same time, the company rolled out the QFX5210-64C, a spine switch that also has 60 100GbE ports, and the QFX5200-48Y, a top-of-rack switch that features 48 25GbE ports.
For the campus, Juniper unveiled two new core switches, the EX2300 and EX4300 that include interfaces that support multiple Gigabit speeds. The EX2300 offers 1GbE and 2.5GbE ports, while the EX4300 has links for 1GbE, 2.5GbE, 5GbE and 10GbE.
Another switch, the compact EX9250, supports both Juniper’s Junos Fusion and the EVPN-VXLAN fabrics. Juniper is also offering a cloud-based service called Sky Enterprise that enables users to deploy and manage campus and branch networks and security devices. It includes a web dashboard and can reduce change errors by up to 90 percent, according to officials.
Juniper is addressing the branch with the NFX150 Network Services Platform that brings together branch security and hybrid WAN functionality with 4G and LTE wireless connectivity between branches. It also supports third-party virtual network functions (VNFs).
In addition, the company is offering new subscription-based pricing for its Contrail software defined-WAN (SD-WAN) product, which includes the vendor’s SRX Series Services Gateway, NFX Series network service platform. The idea is to expand the options for bringing SD-WAN management to physical and virtual endpoints.
Juniper also is aiming to enable enterprises to more securely move their workloads to public or private clouds by automating the setup of secure IPsec connectivity between networks in the data center, campus or branch and virtual private clouds in Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.