Cisco ACI and Citrix NetScaler Automate Services Provisioning and Increase Application Performance

With Cisco Live coming up in San Diego at Citrix we are ramping up to talk about NetScaler and the integration that we have done with Cisco Application Centric Architecture (ACI). The world’s leading enterprises, service providers, cloud computing platforms, and eight of the top ten internet-centric companies, have standardized on Citrix NetScaler to deliver their business-critical web applications. By integrating with Cisco ACI we are bringing the benefits of the top application delivery controller to the leading software defined network architecture and enabling our customers to automate NetScaler deployments.

Challenges with Application Delivery
As businesses look to IT as a point of strategic differentiation, agility in the datacenter becomes more critical than ever. Fundamental to this change is the capability of IT to respond quickly to changing business requirements. Applications serve as the core of any business, but applications are only as agile as the infrastructure on which they run. With yesterday’s datacenter infrastructure, this can mean waiting weeks for an application change. Application agility, mobility, and rapid deployment require the datacenter infrastructure to dynamically respond to application needs as a result of changing business requirements.

A Look Back at 2014 and Innovation at Juniper Networks

As the year comes to an end it’s always interesting to look back at the changes in the industry and the progress that we made as a company in the last year. There were many trends that emerged or took further hold of the industry in 2014. Let’s take a look at them and see how Juniper delivered innovation in these areas. Cloud computing and the need for on-demand resources was a big one. The open source movement is continuing to grow in the cloud space and OpenStack and CloudStack are gaining momentum. The Dev/Ops movement and the need for automation of IT resources was another big trend in the news. We saw Dev/Ops extend to networking equipment like the top of rack switch, when it had previously been mainly for server configuration. Overlay networks took hold in 2014 with the likes of Juniper’s Contrail and VMware’s NSX gaining momentum. New network fabric architectures were introduced like IPClos that is popular with the MSDC’s or Massively Scalable Data Center Operators and Spine and Leaf architectures that offer simplified deployment and management. The rise of the Open Compute Project and its move to include networking was a bit of a surprise for me. There is certainly something going on there.

Openstack/Cloudstack Integration
Cloud computing is transforming the way business is done today. It’s not hard to see why when you consider all the benefits that the cloud promises such as flexibility, business agility and economies of scale. As you look into the underlying layers of compute, storage and network, there is complexity in managing such an infrastructure in a dynamic environment. Organizations that are building clouds need a platform to automate the deployment of infrastructure. In addition to offerings from commercial vendors this type of software stack is being developed by the user community of open source organizations. In the interests of being open and offering our customers choices Juniper announced support for OpenStack back in 2013. We continued this momentum by announcing support for CloudStack in 2014. For more on CloudStack see, CloudStack and Juniper’s MetaFabric, Enabling Private and Public Cloud.

Automation Integration with Puppet, Chef and Ansible
Juniper has always been about being open. We serve a diverse set of customers with different use cases who like to use different tool sets. Back in 2013 we announced support for Puppet. We kept up this momentum by later announcing support for Chef and then for Ansible in 2014. There are sysadmin using Puppet or Chef to manipulate infrastructure as code. Because we are open, we’ve productize the capability to work with these tools into both our hardware and software solutions. Ultimately this gives our customers greater flexibility, without having to do a costly rip and replace of their infrastructure, in choosing which automation tools to use. Of course Juniper has had on the box automation as a part of JUNOS for many years. For more on automation see, Automation with Chef, Puppet and Ansible.

Making the Transition to an Open SDN Architecture in the Enterprise Private Cloud

Enterprise IT is moving away from acting as siloed service organizations to aligning with the business’ goals to help their organizations enhance their business agility, value and customer experience. Many of these organizations are moving to a cloud computing model to achieve these goals, but they haven’t determined the best strategy for making this transition.
Transitioning to the cloud will help these organizations accelerate innovation and business agility by emphasizing a number of important factors.  Adaptability is one.  Seamless scale, both upward and downward, is another. Network intelligence that will provide proactive resource optimization is a third.

To make this transition, organizations need the right infrastructure, and they must be prepared to answer questions regarding SDN, orchestration, security, network protocols and many other issues.

These are addressed by two application-aware architectures for the enterprise private cloud:

1.    Juniper Networks’ open SDN architecture

2.    A proprietary programmable architecture that requires investment in a centralized controller and application-aware switch combination.

Announcing Juniper's Most Highly-Available Campus Distribution Switch

Recently Juniper Networks announced the EX4600 switch that is built for the distribution layer in campus networks. It is designed for IT networking teams of enterprises and SMBs who are rolling out new applications and services and require higher performance to support them. This compact switch delivers innovations that were developed in the data center including ISSU for hitless upgrades, Insight Technology for performane monitoring and 40GbE ports for high speed uplinks. It works as a standalone switch as well as in Virtual Chassis and MC-LAG architectures as an options providing simplified management and network resiliency.

 

IT organizations are concerned about having sufficient switching performance to support increasing access to applications in the cloud from the campus. They need to support diverse devices for the current BYOD trend as well as support the demands of services like VDI, the growing use of wireless access and unified communications. As they continue to scale, designing their operations to accommodate increasing volumes of traffic, IT organizations are concerned about managing secure access, connectivity and bandwidth usage. However, despite the increasing and ever changing network usage patterns and the demands of supporting more devices and services IT teams are still expected to make things work with limited staffing resources and budgets. What the IT teams require is an easy-to-manage solution that delivers high-performance connectivity at an affordable price.

“More than three-quarters of the IT organizations we surveyed have either already standardized their campus networks on 10 GbE or are actively planning a move from 1 GbE to 10 GbE. Drivers include bandwidth-intensive applications, current or anticipated traffic levels and falling costs of the technology,” said Bob Laliberte, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.

A Network Fabric for New Applications in the Data Center

The Network Challenge with Deploying Applications
Thanks to virtualization organizations can bring up new applications and services quickly. Unfortunately, many data center networks don’t let you fully capitalize on the business agility that virtualization and modern application architectures provide. Traditional network architectures are too slow and too cumbersome to configure. For true agility, enterprises need a high-performance, low-latency fabric network that can be managed like a single, logical switch.

Today’s mid-sized and large-scale data centers are built with high-performance blade and rack servers, which typically run multiple VMs, which in turn run increasingly modular, web- and cloud-based applications. These modern applications are driving increased traffic levels and different traffic patterns, which place specific demands on the data center network.Critical business applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) are divided into multiple modules. As a result, relatively simple operations such as entering an order can trigger 100 or more individual transactions, each imposing its own latency. Some applications, including eCommerce applications, even behave dynamically, spinning up new instances or migrating workloads in response to traffic loads.

Their distributed nature means modern applications are spread across racks of servers, each served by multiple switches. The applications generate a tremendous amount of server-to-server, or east-west, traffic as the various modules communicate with one another. Multi-tier network architectures aren’t well matched to modern applications. They force this east-west traffic to first travel north and south, up and down the network tree, before arriving at its ultimate destination, adding significant latency that can cause application performance to degrade under load.

The Critical Role of the Business Edge Network

The Service Provider’s Challenge
Businesses are increasingly using service providers to host critical applications and data in order to better control the security and availability of the data and to mitigate the expenses associated with hosting and serving data locally to the entire business user base. They access these applications and data over the service provider’s business edge network. This creates a challenge for the service provider, because their customers measure the success of the network by its ability to handle critical data and provide a superior user experience. With more and more applications and data centralized, the importance of the network, and its role in the success of the business, becomes ever more critical.

Market forces have created an environment of unpredictability for the service provider. Mobile devices, new applications, and the flood of new content place a direct strain on the business edge network, forcing the business and the service provider to address the network in creative ways. Maintaining and evolving the end-user experience is critical to the success of the network and key to enabling the service provider to meet its business goals.

The business user base, places considerable expectations on the network. Users expect their business e-mail and voice over IP calls to work flawlessly, while also expecting mobile video and applications to perform seamlessly. The impact of network performance is real and must be factored into the design of future business networks. This challenges the business edge provider to optimize the design and find ways to reduce the cost in the face of the increasingly complex and growing demand for a high-quality end-user experience.

Connecting Islands of Resources in an SDN Data Center

Application Agility is Critical
Organizations are rolling out new applications that they use to drive the business. These applications are virtualized. They are increasingly distributed, dynamic and they can span locations. They connect employees, customers and the supply chain. They make employees more productive, help customers to engage with the business and facilitate better inventory management. They also provide timely business intelligence.  This means revenue to the organization. Time to deploy is critical. Organizations need to be agile when it comes to deploying new applications.

The problem is that the network is an obstacle. Due to the complexity of configuring the network speed of deployment is an issue. There are so many things that need to be configured. You need to configure route mapping, port mapping, VLAN mapping, QOS, NAT, ACLs and the list goes on.  The networking side hasn’t changed since it was invented decades ago. It takes weeks to configure the network connections that are needed when you deploy an application.

Organizations have been using server virtualization for years to overcome the limitations of physical server virtualization. When you have to deploy a physical server it could take weeks from the time you first knew you needed it until it was up and running. Now provisioning virtual servers only takes minutes. With virtualized servers we realized agility and resilience and improved physical server utilization. We need the same type of benefits for the network. You can’t let the network get in the way when you need to move fast and gain the advantages of new applications. Organizations are looking for ways to provision the network work quickly.

Choosing the Right Switch is Critical to your Transformation Project

If your organization is going through a data center transformation project you are probably looking at your options for switching infrastructure. As you design your network to support the move to virtualized compute infrastructure and the roll out of new application deployments the choice of switching infrastructure becomes a critical decision. One of the most versatile switching platforms on the market is Juniper’s QFX Series 10GbE/40GbE devices.  I’ve had the opportunity to talk with many of our customers about the projects that they are using the QFX switches for and why they chose it over the other options in the market. I’d like to share these examples with you.

Many organizations are undergoing data center transformation projects such as moving to a virtualized data center, deploying large scale Enterprise applications, converging data and SAN networks, and undertaking big data analytics projects. They are looking for a versatile switching platform that they can deploy in any of these scenarios. The QFX switches are high-performance, low-latency, 1RU edge devices that are installed at the top-of-rack in the data center. They include rich Layer 2 and Layer 3 support and standards-based bridging, routing and FCoE capabilities. They can be deployed as standalone switches and then as the deployments increase in scale they can be converted to a QFabric node through a simple software upgrade. This makes them ideal for these types of projects.

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.

Leveraging Data Center Interconnect For Business Continuity

It’s Time to Reengineer the Wide Area Network
Similar to the data center, organizations are growing increasingly reliant on the wide area network that connects data centers to help them run their businesses.  While the WAN is key to data backup plans for maintaining business continuity, many WAN links aren’t up to the task. Standards-based data center interconnect technology could help you keep operating in the face of a disaster, but some reengineering of the WAN might be in order if the plan is going to work.

Business continuity planning is not always a top priority, since many view it as insurance and not a business driver.  However, you might be able to combine efforts to help you achieve your goals. For instance, transitioning to a private cloud may require WAN links to be reengineered to provide bandwidth on demand so that virtualized workloads can move between data centers based on user demand and resource utilization. This has the added benefit of supporting the varying bandwidth requirements for backing up data between data centers.

Business Continuity and DCI Strategies
When you use DCI to replicate data between geographically distributed locations you will want to configure your LAN connections so that application and storage traffic can flow between data centers as needed to so that you can maximize application availability and provide data redundancy in the case of an outage. Here are some things to think about.

Making the Move to Juniper and Junos – Why it is Worth the Effort.

Is it hard to move to Juniper and Junos and is it worth the effort? It’s a question that we hear often. Many people have been trained on one vendors equipment and OS and used it for years. Then the time comes to upgrade those old switches or routers or maybe add to the WLAN or security infrastructure. It’s the opportunity to try something new. Maybe you’ve been thinking of making the move to Juniper, but you've been wondering how hard it is and if it is worth the effort. I’ve gathered comments and observations that I’d like to share

Why take a multi-vendor approach?
There are many reasons to look at a multi-vendor network. There might be some features that you need to support your applications. You might want to select the devices that give what you really want, instead of buying from the incumbent just because they are familiar. One of the biggest advantages can be to keep your network standards based and rely on proprietary protocols. This might save you down the road.

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:

Integrating SRX Security Services with QFabric in the Data Center

The data center is a concentrated deployment environment for networking equipment, consisting of thousands of servers that are accessed by tens of thousands of client systems. The need for large-scale access creates a complex set of data flows to business applications that must be protected. Determining firewall deployment configurations and sizing in a data center is a considerable effort and firewall performance is critical to handle the volume of connections per second, and sustained connections. To address these challenges, Juniper Networks created a new class of security products, the SRX Series Services Gateways, to provide the ability to scale in the data center.

Implementation Guide for the SRX in the Data Center
To help customers deploy the SRX Juniper has created an implementation guide that provides various design considerations and implementation guidelines to deploy firewall services in a Juniper QFabric switch-based data center. The guide is intended for architects, network engineers and operators, and those who require technical knowledge regarding integrating the SRX Series with QFabric technology. The guide reviews the technical concepts of the SRX Series Services Gateways related to design and implementation of firewall services. Deployment scenarios are based on a single logical switch design using the Qfabric.

Network Functions Virtualization is Changing How Services are Delivered

As Service Providers are faced with increased competition from Over the Top Providers they are seeking new markets to enter. However, as they look to create and launch new services they must grapple with the growing number and complexity of hardware devices in their networks. This creates challenges due to the time it takes to certify equipment and with staffing and training of skilled operators for many devices. It also creates cost pressure with the need for more space and power at a time when these resources are becoming ever more expensive. Making upfront capital outlays for equipment in anticipation of revenue that ramps up over time can stress budgets. As a result Service Providers are looking to change how network services are deployed and some are finding Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) as the answer to their problems.

Defining Network Functions Virtualization Services
Network Functions Virtualization is transforming how network operators architect networks by enabling the consolidation of network services onto industry standard servers, which can be located in Data Centers, on Network Nodes or at the user premises. NFV involves delivering network functions as software that can run as virtualized instances and that can be deployed at locations in the network as required, without the need to install equipment for each new service. Network Functions Virtualization is applicable to any network function in both mobile and fixed networks. Network Functions Virtualization is complementary to Software Defined Networking (SDN) but not dependant on it. Virtual appliances might be configured using SDN capabilities and they might be connected via overlay network tunnels in clusters based on an application or based on the needs of an organization.

Achieving Single Touch Provisioning of Services Across The Network

Service provider networks are continually growing and evolving in order to provide a rich end user experience. Ethernet-based services are increasing rapidly to deliver high bandwidth and anytime access to video, voice, and broadband applications. In order to meet the needs of their customers, service providers have built complex networks consisting of thousand of high capacity Ethernet ports on devices in many locations. Typically these devices need to be provisioned, configured, and managed separately, which increases operating costs and time to deploy new services. The challenge is how to achieve single touch provisioning of services across the network.

Most factors contributing to the complexity of service provider networks revolve around the need to provision and manage separate physical platforms. The majority of the service provider’s OpEx cost results from the necessity to have the technical support infrastructure required to maintain and deploy services in a distributed network. Case studies show that by eliminating the need to manage individual devices separately can reduce the service provider’s OpEx by 70%.

Juniper Networks understands the challenges faced by service providers in today’s environment and has created a system called the Junos® Node Unifier (JNU) that enables centralized management, provisioning, and single touch deployment of services across thousands of Ethernet ports. The JNU solution is Juniper’s way to simplify today’s networks. JNU consists of satellite devices connected to a hub, where the satellites can be configured, provisioned, and managed from the hub device, giving a single unified node experience to network operators.

Securing Virtualization in the Cloud-Ready Data Center

With the rapid growth in the adoption of server virtualization new requirements for securing the data center have emerged. Today’s data center contains a combination of physical servers and virtual servers. With the advent of distributed applications traffic often travels between virtual servers and might not be seen by physical security devices. This means that security solutions for both environments are needed. As organizations increasingly implement cloud computing security for the virtualized environment is as integral a component as traditional firewalls have been in physical networks.

Juniper's Integrated Portfolio Delivers a Solution
With a long history of building security products Juniper Networks understands the security requirements of the new data center, and Juniper’s solutions are designed to address these changing needs. The physical security portfolio includes the Juniper Networks SRX3000 and SRX5000 line of services gateways, and the Juniper Networks STRM Series Security Threat Response Managers. These physical devices are integrated with the Juniper Networks vGW Virtual Gateway software firewall that integrates with the VMware vCenter and the VMware ESXi server infrastructure.

Fundamental to virtual data center and cloud security is the control of access to virtual machines (VMs) and the applications running on them, for the specific business purposes sanctioned by the organization. At its foundation, the vGW is a hypervisor-based, VM safe certified, stateful virtual firewall that inspects all packets to and from VMs, blocking all unapproved connections. Administrators can enforce stateful virtual firewall policies for individual VMs, logical groups of VMs, or all VMs. Global, group, and single VM rules ensure easy creation of “trust zones” with strong control over high value VMs, while enabling enterprises to take full advantage of many virtualization benefits. vGW integration with the STRM and SRX Series provides a complete solution for the mixed physical and virtualized workloads.

Have We Hit The Network Breaking Point?

We have all noticed that the business environment is changing at a rapid pace. IT departments, previously seen as cost centers, were tasked with reducing their infrastructure and even justifying their existence, but not anymore. With the rise of just-in-time manufacturing, and long tail customization, all driven by ecommerce that’s increasingly accessed from mobile devices, the old rules are being turned upside down.  The IT organization is now tasked with enabling the business to drive innovation.

The Opportunity that Comes with Change
While change comes with opportunity, we know change isn’t always easy. The old ways of building infrastructure and networks are no longer working. Organizations need to adapt to a world where customers use social media and create huge amounts of data that contains business intelligence.  All of us have questions about what is happening in the IT space, what the challenges are and what do to about it. That is why Juniper got together with Forrester and did some research to help sort this all out.

It started in July 2012, when Juniper Networks commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate what enterprises need from a network in order to scale for business and meet future needs. Forrester Consulting surveyed 150 IT business decision-makers from enterprises across the United States, and yesterday the results were shared in a webinar. It was a conversation between Forrester Analyst Andre Kindness, Juniper’s CIO Bask Iyer and Mark Settle from BMC Software. I listened in and there was a lot to learn. 

Solving the Network Services Provisioning Challenge

Centralization of applications at large scale in a consolidated data center, and the increasing size of software-as-a-service application deployments, create the need to deploy thousands of 1GbE/10GbE ports to connect to servers and storage devices in the data center. Service providers need a way to terminate application servers without having to build layers of separately managed networking devices. They also need to be able to configure services from a central location and automate the provisioning of their network devices. This is driving the need for a device-based solution that can control thousands of network ports from a single point and that can interface with service orchestration systems.

The Services Provisioning Challenge
As service providers seek to deploy new cloud and network services at high scale, managing and maintaining individual network devices adds additional layers of operational complexity. As layers of network devices are added to the environment, service providers have to work with multiple management systems to provision, troubleshoot, and operate the devices. These additional layers may translate into additional points of failure or dependency reducing service performance. To meet this challenge Juniper Networks has released the Junos Node Unifier, a Junos OS platform clustering program that reduces complexity and increases deployment flexibility by centralizing management and automating configuration of switch ports attached to MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers acting as hubs. You can visit the landing page for the product launch here, link.

Simplifying the Network
The Junos Node Unifier enables scaling up of applications in the data center by supporting a low cost method to connect network devices to a central hub. It reduces equipment and cabling costs and increases deployment flexibility by centralizing management and automating device configuration, while overcoming chassis limitations to enable the connection of thousands of switch ports to be attached to the MX Series platform. The Junos Node Unifier solution leverages the MX Series modular chassis-based systems as well as access platforms including Juniper Networks QFX3500 QFabric Node, Juniper Networks EX4200 Ethernet Switch and EX3300 Ethernet Switch, to be used as hub and satellites respectively. Junos Node Unifier leverages the full feature set of these devices to support multiple connection types at optimal rates, with increased interface density as well as support for L2 switching and L3/MPLS routing on the access satellites.

Juniper’s New Network Platform Architecture

If you talked with me at Interop, Las Vegas last week you heard me speak of Juniper’s New Network Platform Architecture. The New Network Platform Architecture is an initiative that brings together Juniper’s innovations in silicon, software, and systems to deliver best-in-class network designs that enable business advantages for our customers. This is a milestone for Juniper, and it shows the commitment that we have to delivering value to our customers to help them compete in today’s market place.

Juniper’s Focus on the Customer
Juniper’s approach to designing network architectures is to solve today’s business and technology limitations with designs that deliver greater efficiency, increased business value, better performance, and opportunity that will last. With a focus on our customer’s business objectives, the demands of their applications, and workflow needs, our approach is to design architectures that lift legacy limitations and transform our customer’s expectations for the network. Our objective is to drive business value for our customers by optimizing their network investments. We simplify architectures, operation models, and workflows to optimize network investments. By using our domain designs customer can optimize their network investments to increase productivity, generate revenue, and enhance the quality of the user experience.

The Changing Environment
With soaring growth in bandwidth demand, mobile consumer devices, cloud, and M2M, network needs and pace of innovation have changed dramatically, and Juniper is enabling our customers to grow and capture the opportunity. Our differentiation is our ability to take complex architectures, legacy operating systems, and simplify, modernize, and scale for our customers. From core routing to data centers, Juniper has consistently delivered breakthrough innovations leveraging our expertise in silicon, systems, and software to help our customers increase efficiency, drive business value, and accelerate service delivery.