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.

Getting on the Path to SDN with Juniper Networks

A number of IT trends—including the consumerization of IT, cloud computing, and social media— present significant opportunities for businesses to improve productivity. Before adopting these technologies, however, organizations try to fully understand the impact they will have on the underlying infrastructure and, more specifically, the network environment, since it is a critical enabler for all of these services. As a result organizations are looking to innovation in the network to meet their business needs.

Trends Impacting the Network
As organizations continue to innovate and expand their virtualized environments beyond the simple benefits of consolidation to a more agile infrastructure, they have begun to build out private clouds. These agile IT environments enable business managers to rapidly turn up new services to meet unexpected demand or requirements. However, this abstraction layer can create blind spots in the infrastructure and make meeting compliance requirements difficult.

Social media applications present another challenge as the explosion in the number of network-connected devices opens up avenues to new applications and collaboration tools. Well known applications such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter often blur the lines between business and personal usage and video create demands on the network. The question is how to ensure performance, while protecting data ensuring privacy.

Juniper’s Internet Edge Implementation Guide is Here

Juniper has created an implementation guide that will help network designers create a simplified Internet edge solution using Juniper Networks MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers, SRX Series Secure Services Gateways, and EX Series Ethernet Switches. This guide details specific design considerations, best practices, and Juniper tools that can be used to build the optimal solution. It concludes with a real-world deployment example that illustrates the solution and recommended configurations in detail.

The Role of the Internet Edge
The Internet edge acts as the enterprise’s gateway to the Internet. It provides connectivity to the Internet for data center, campus, and branch offices, and it connects remote workers, customers, and partners to enterprise resources. It can also be used to provide backup connectivity to the WAN for branch offices, in case the primary connection to the enterprise WAN fails.

Today’ s Internet edge must enable access to a variety of applications such as cloud computing solutions, mission critical applications, and bandwidth hungry applications such as video. The Internet edge must also scale seamlessly to support growing application performance and bandwidth needs, while supporting a rich set of routing and security features. This guide will help you reach this goal.

Is it Time to Rethink Your Business Continuity - Disaster Recovery Plan?

Have you been thinking about the need to update your Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan? You are not alone. According to recent research by The 451 Group disaster recovery planning is top of mind for the Enterprise and data replication is a top 2 storage initiative for IT organizations. Data replication has always been important but it was often seen as too expensive to implement. With virtualization technology data replication can be easier to implement than before and BC/DR is seen as a major motivator for implementing server virtualization. With virtualization in place you can replicate data at the Virtual Machine level. In many cases you can even put your database in a virtual machine. This makes it much easier to control the back up process and to keep track of your applications and data as well as to get them up and running at the new location.

Business Continuity is a Top Concern
It’s no wonder that BC/DR planning is getting more attention. We remember the outages and financial loss that occurred from disasters ranging from floods, to tornadoes and hurricanes to the tsunami in Japan. You have probably seen the statistics warning that 75% without business continuity plans fail within three years of a disaster, and 43% with no emergency plan never reopen. Government regulations have also dramatically increased the Data Replication and compliance requirements. These situations have increased the awareness of the need to maintain productivity within a company, sustain value chain relationships, deliver continued services to customers and partners, all of which can be difficult if we are moving applications and user connections to a new data center location.

Is VXLAN the Answer to the Network Virtualization Question?

Network virtualization is a growing topic of interest and for some good reasons as networks scale to meet the challenges of cloud computing they are running up against VLAN scaling limitations. There have been several network overlay technologies released that seek to address the challenges with network scaling and to enable workload mobility. One of these technologies is VXLAN. It has a few proponents who say that it can meet the requirements for network virtualization. While it sounds good on the surface, it is worth it to take a closer look. With VMWorld happening this week in San Francisco I’m sure that network virtualization will be a hot topic, especially considering the VMware Nicera news, so I thought I’d comment on it and offer some thoughts and options.

The Origins of VXLAN
The VXLAN buzz started during a keynote at VMworld in August 2011, when VMware CTO Steve Herrod announced the Virtual eXtensible LAN protocol, which VMware positions as a technology that “enables multi-tenant networks at scale, as the first step towards logical, software-based networks that can be created on-demand, enabling  enterprises to leverage capacity wherever it’s available. Networking vendors Cisco and Arista are actively promoting VXLAN and have collaborated with VMware to develop and test the technology on their products. Cisco highlighted VXLAN at their Cisco Live user conference again in June 2012 and Arista is demoing it at VMWorld, however with the Nicira announcement VMWare seems to have taken that next step. VXLAN sounds interesting, so let's see how good of an idea it is.

Meet up with Juniper at VMWorld San Francisco

Are you and your colleagues headed to VMworld next week? Stop by and meet the Juniper team at booth #1517 where will be talking about the security and network architectures needed to move to an agile virtualized datacenter. It's going to be interesting with all of the changes that are happening in network virtualization. I'm looking forward to some interesting keynotes and sessions as well as catching up with friends in the industry.

Juniper has a lot planned for the show including speaking sessions, and a slew of in booth demos, plus we are handing out USB car chargers. I'll be there on Sunday afternoon so stop by and say hello.

You should stop by our booth if you:
- Are virtualizing important apps or are from regulated industries
- Have service oriented application architectures
- Want to use the vMotion technology to move workloads around a datacenter
- Have an old network that you need to upgrade to enable greater performance and workload mobility
- Need to secure mobile devices for VDI or BYOD
- Want to learn how UAC or Secure Access can be run in a VMware environment

Making the Case for Long Distance Virtual Machine Mobility

With VMWorld coming up I’m reminded of a top of mind subject, virtual machine mobility. The reason for moving virtual machines is to better allocate server resources and maintain application performance. It’s a useful technology that works great in the data center. We also hear a lot about the need to move virtual machines across the WAN, live, without losing sessions. This is known as Long Distance vMotion or generically as long distance live migration. This might sound like a good idea, but it gets a bit complicated when you think outside the data center walls and across the WAN. It creates complexity in the network, as maintaining sessions requires keeping the same IP address and MAC address after the move.  There are many proposed use cases for it, but is it such a good idea?

Limitations of Live Migration
Long distance live migration over the WAN has limitations due to latency and bandwidth requirements and the complexity of extending layer 2 which is required to maintain the same MAC address. Issues include the potential for traffic coming first to the original data center where the gateway is, and then looping to the new data center where the VM has moved.  Traffic can also loop back over the WAN to reach the storage that stayed behind. There are also bandwidth requirements to handle the large scale movement, as well as issues with storage pooling and storage replication as well as the complexity of implementing the L2 bridging architecture. If we are going to deal with all of this complexity of moving virtual machines over the WAN there had better be a good reason to do it. But is there? Here is a look at the various use cases for long live migration that I have found.