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.
Showing posts with label switching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label switching. Show all posts
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
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.
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.
Friday, April 25, 2014
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.
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.
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Build your Network with the Vertical Campus Implementation Guide
Designing a large campus network can be a daunting task. It is certainly a complex undertaking. It can be especially difficult if you have to configure equipment that you haven’t worked with before. You might find yourself wishing that someone would write a how to guide. At Juniper Network we hear you and that’s why we’ve published another one of our Implementation guides. This one is for the Vertical Campus. It will show you the way to set up Juniper LAN, WLAN, and security devices and help you get up and running in a shorter time, with a tested and proven design.
The Vertical Campus Implementation Guide
The Juniper Networks® Vertical Campus Implementation Guide provides a simple, tested, step-by-step process for rapidly deploying a large campus solution. The design incorporates the most commonly used enterprise network technologies to provide a simple and scalable network architecture that includes LAN, WLAN, and security components. The guide presents a specific configuration of Juniper Networks hardware and software platforms that have been tested and provide a reliable foundation on which to base a customized network for your business.
The Vertical Campus Implementation Guide
The Juniper Networks® Vertical Campus Implementation Guide provides a simple, tested, step-by-step process for rapidly deploying a large campus solution. The design incorporates the most commonly used enterprise network technologies to provide a simple and scalable network architecture that includes LAN, WLAN, and security components. The guide presents a specific configuration of Juniper Networks hardware and software platforms that have been tested and provide a reliable foundation on which to base a customized network for your business.
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