Introducing Juniper's Enterprise Data Center Solution

The data center infrastructure is evolving. Application architectures have become more distributed; compute has gone from dedicated hosts to hypervisors, and storage has become converged and shared.  The challenge facing organizations is that they need to evolve the network to better serve the business. The network must become simpler and flatter, more automated, more open and integrated with the rest of the environment. A simple and flat network delivers the performance, and management and orchestration integration help the businesses to stay agile. Let’s take a look at how we make this happen.

Challenges in the Data Center Today
The two major challenges in today’s virtualized data center networks are connectivity and operations. Organizations are looking to achieve greater business agility to respond and adapt quickly to business needs. For enterprises that view IT as a strategic business asset, this is characterized by:

Virtualization – Enterprises are increasing their virtualized workloads; 97% of enterprise organizations have engaged in a server virtualization project within the last 12 months according to IDC.

More agile service delivery models such as cloud computing – Enterprises are looking to take the next step in self-provisioned services; estimates say that 42% of enterprises will have a private cloud project in the next six months.

Expanding data types and sets – Any way you slice it, big data has big impact. Data storage, data analytics, and data visualization will all have an impact on data center networks. The overall market for Big Data is expected to grow to $53.4B by 2016.

A Complete Portfolio for the Data Center
Juniper’s Data Center Solution is a complete portfolio of network and security products and technologies that simplify the network to align with today’s dynamic data center environments. The solution includes:

World-class routing and switching platforms – Built on Juniper’s philosophy of high-performance platforms that can scale, these systems include innovations that also deliver management and operational simplicity.

Rich security products that control both physical and virtual assets – Beginning with a full portfolio of physical security services gateways and extending into software applications and services for virtual visibility and control, Juniper delivers holistic security capabilities for the virtualized data center.

Management and software services – Juniper delivers management capabilities that help simplify the operations of virtualized data center networks and security services—not just for our network products, but integration within the ecosystem. Moving forward, this will be an even stronger area of emphasis for our portfolio.

Simplicity Defines Juniper’s Solution  
Juniper’s enterprise data center solution enables strategic data center transformations, and migration to a private cloud environment.  It is a solution defined by the concept of simplicity.

Simplicity - Juniper believes in building solutions that make things as simple as possible to help our customers become more agile and achieve greater economics. Juniper believes in building the simplest networks possible for our customers’ data centers and applications, no matter what tools and services they are using, adding value by reducing deployment time and accelerating business agility.

There are four main characteristics that enable us to deliver simplicity to our customers:

Flat – Juniper has two switching architectures—QFabric and Virtual Chassis—that make the network as flat and simple as possible. This is achieved through fewer physical devices to manage and fewer points of interaction and failure, delivering performance at scale while maintaining the simplified operations of a single device.

Automated – Simple networks are easier to automate. We deliver powerful automation capabilities on our platforms, such as Zero Touch Provisioning, and automation through management products such as Virtual Control and Security Director. We will continue to deliver even more capabilities with Network Director which is Juniper’s device management platform.

Open – Automation at the network level is only the first step. To get to a simpler solution, the network needs to interact with the other elements in the ecosystem and needs open, programmable interfaces that enable organizations to roll out applications quickly and efficiently without waiting for the network. Today, this is accomplished through the Junos SDK. We have announced plans to support different protocols such as VXLAN and OpenFlow and will continue to support open-source plug-ins such as OpenStack.

Integrated – With these open interfaces, our products can integrate into any data center. We work with different hypervisors, servers, storage elements and management systems. We further simplify the deployment and operations process by validating and testing complete solutions that include network, storage, servers, hypervisors and management systems, and then publishing these designs.

Components of the Data Center Solution
Juniper offers a comprehensive portfolio of routing, switching, security and management solutions to address this challenge.

These include:
EX Series Ethernet switches with Virtual Chassis technology
QFX Series standalone 10GbE switches
QFX3000-M and QFX3000-G QFabric Systems
MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers
SRX Series Security Gateways
vGW Series Virtual Gateways
Junos Space Virtual Control, Network Director and Security Design
Junos SDK

For more information see, www.juniper.net/datacenter