Juniper Networks Revolutionises Data Centre Assurance with New Enhancements

Juniper Networks®, a leader in secure, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-native networking, has announced several new and unique enhancements to its data centre assurance capabilities, driving exceptional user experiences through increased network visibility, analysis, and automation.

The Juniper data center networking solution, which is the most flexible to design and easiest to manage, now incorporates new cloud-hosted services that leverage AI for networking to deliver enhanced insights into application behaviors, both traditional and emerging AI workloads, for ongoing optimisation and rapid troubleshooting.

In addition, Juniper Networks has added new capabilities for analysing and validating data centre operations plus even richer telemetry data which, alongside other data centre assurance capabilities, help to reduce deployment times by up to 85 percent and cut OPEX costs by up to 90 percent in some instances.

“We’ve developed industry-leading AIOps capabilities driven by Mist AI™ and powerful intent-based networking capabilities with Apstra. These two technologies integrated together deliver an unbeatable experience for our customers that operate data centres. The addition of new cloud and AI capabilities with Apstra Cloud Services will further extend the strength of our data center solution. There has never been a better time to build high-performance, low-latency, multivendor data centre solutions that are simple, fast, and economical to deploy and operate,” said Praveen Jain, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Data Centre, at Juniper Networks.

Juniper Networks’ Enhanced and Expanded Networking Solution

Juniper Networks’ data centre networking solution today consists of QFX Series Switches, EX Series Switches, PTX Series Routers, ACX Series Routers, and high-performance SRX Series Firewalls managed via Juniper Apstra data centre assurance software and the Marvis™ Virtual Network Assistant (VNA).

As a key part of the Juniper AI-Native Networking Platform, the solution leverages the right data to deliver the right real-time responses for highly reliable data centre networking. This enables unique capabilities, such as multivendor intent-based networking and switch management, proactive AIOps, and a GenAI conversational interface for knowledgebase queries.

From traditional data centres to new data centres for AI training, inference, and storage clusters, Juniper Networks combines exceptional performance with best-in-class flexibility and operational simplicity, plus switch management, proactive AIOps, and a GenAI conversational interface for knowledge-base queries.

To simplify data centre operations and maximise network performance even further, Juniper has added new and unique software enhancements, which include:

• New AI-Native cloud services that improve application visibility and assurance to optimise performance and lower mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR). Juniper is launching two new data centre cloud services, Service Awareness and Impact Analysis, to complement the Marvis VNA for Data Center AI-Nativecloud service announced earlier this year.
• Service Awarenessleverages AIOps to add application and service data to the Juniper network knowledge graph, enabling greater application-to-network visibility. Service Awareness increases the understanding of where apps and services attach, how they communicate across the network, and what resources they consume, providing direct insights and supporting additional assurance capabilities such as Impact Analysis.
• Impact Analysisbuilds on Service Awareness to enable faster troubleshooting and issue resolution and improved application assurance. AI/ML maps identified issues to impacts, providing a clear picture of which issues are responsible for application impacts and which are unrelated. State comparison between different times improves identification and resolution of transient issues.

Service Awareness and Impact Analysis are now available in the Juniper Apstra Premium licence tier at no extra charge. Marvis VNA for Data Centre, the initial application in the Juniper Apstra Cloud Services suite, continues to be available in all three Juniper Apstra licence tiers (Standard, Advanced, Premium) at no extra charge.  All three data centre cloud services are built on Juniper’s proven microservices cloud architecture, which maximises scale, resiliency, and performance. Five of the Fortune 10 companies, for example, use Juniper’s microservices cloud architecture.

“We’ve seen a steady increase in customer adoption of Apstra to optimise the design, deployment, and ongoing operations of data center network fabrics. The new cloud and AIOps capabilities will further solidify the operational value Juniper brings to NetDevOps teams while helping Presidio deliver automated, scalable, and easy-to-deploy-and-manage data centre networking solutions to our customers,” said Vince Trama, Chief Revenue Officer at Presidio.

Juniper Networks: An Industry Leader in Intent-Based Networking

Continued investment in intent-based networking improves the operator experience and further optimises application performance​. Juniper Networks leads the industry with Intent-Based Networking for data centre assurance. The latest release of Juniper Apstra (version 5.0), which is a seamless upgrade for current users, builds on this leadership by adding over 100 new features focused on simplifying data centre operations even further. Examples include:

• Enhanced EVPN analytics that makes complex EVPN operations simple.
• Intent-based Analytics (IBA) easy buttons, visual guides, and more that turn raw data into actionable insights faster than ever.
• Simplified switch port validations to eliminate vendor-specific conflicts in a multivendor environment and avoid network impacts.
• Expanded environmental telemetry data, now covering traffic, switch health, optics, power supplies, fans, and temperature, to aid troubleshooting today and provide baseline data that can enable future AI-driven predictive/proactive maintenance applications for increased reliability and enhanced sustainability compliance.

“As a leading nonprofit health system in the Upper Midwest, the network is critical for Avera to provide the best patient care. Juniper Networks’ intent-based networking solution previously improved reliability and simplified the operations of our data centre infrastructure.  Now we’re also using the new cloud services and AIOps capabilities and we’ve seen early success. We are excited to use the new application assurance capabilities and expect them to help make the employee and patient experience even better,” said Matt Schroeder, Network Engineering Manager at Avera Health.

“Today’s hyper-connected digital business environment is placing more and more pressure on the network and networking staff. AIOps advancements, intent-based networking, and application intelligence provide much-needed relief for these pressures by bolstering the resiliency and responsiveness of the network infrastructure, enabling a more precise and proactive approach to network management. Juniper Networks’ latest AI-native networking platform enhancements enable data centre operators to become more application-aware and deliver application assurance that improves end-user experiences,” noted Mark Leary, Research Director, Network Observability & Automation, at IDC.