Dealing with Change in the Data Center - Getting to Network as a Service

We are continuing on a long transition from the physical data center to the virtual data center. Resources that were wholly physical are being virtualized. Resources that were static are now dynamic. This trend started with server virtualization and has expanded to network virtualization. With the move to virtualization you have made progress in gaining better utilization your physical resources. You are using fewer physical servers but they are larger and denser. There are more virtual machines and more network ports to connect them. This has created an exponential growth in the number of interactions that you must make on the network to get everything connected and communicating. The challenge is in the time it takes to get work done. Let’s look at some tools that Juniper provides to make your life easier.

Zero Touch Provisioning
Your first step is to get the equipment up and running. Juniper provides a zero touch provisioning tool that lets you do this using standard configurations for the switches and a DHCP server to assign an IP address and things like that. It’s used by the networking team. It handles routine tasks that are typically done once. With ZTP highly repetitive routing tasks that took hours can be reduced to minutes.

Automate Network Configuration with Puppet for Junos OS

With the exponential growth in the numbers of servers in Enterprise Data Center and the corresponding complexity and confusion that can follow the need for management automation of server resources is well understood by the IT staff. However for every server there are one or more network connections that need to be configured and managed and until recently this was still a manual process.  Juniper Networks has addressed this challenge with the release of Puppet for Junos OS.

Why Resource Automation is Needed
Driven to reduce costs while providing high levels of computing power, enterprises are adopting cloud-based computing models based on large numbers of low-cost processors and virtual machines. This is fueling an exponential increase in the volume and complexity of server and network management. Meanwhile, understaffed IT organizations are tasked with supporting the business, as the organizations they serve are under pressure to move with agility in a competitive business environment.