News

Juniper SD-WAN Update Furthers Multicloud Vision

• By David Ramel
• 06/29/2018

By updating its SD-WAN offering, Juniper Networks said it has taken another incremental step to help organizations reach multicloud nirvana: managing disparate networks as one cohesive set of resources.

This goal of unifying datacenter, campus and branch networks with public clouds into one enterprise-wide fabric involves distinct paths for each resource, and the recent update to Juniper's SD-WAN solution signifies another step forward, the company said.

Using software-defined networking (SDN) technology and approaches, SD-WANs are a growing part of the next-gen networking and virtualization space, simplifying WAN management and operations by decoupling the networking hardware from its control mechanism.

Juniper's Contrail SD-WAN update is part of an expansion of its campus portfolio, announced yesterday, that includes broadening the reach of its EVPN-VXLAN fabric to campus networks. This, the company said, will enable a common architecture through the combination of campus and datacenter architectures. The EVPN-VXLAN protocol provides layer-3 transport with layer-2 capabilities that allow organizations to evolve while also taking into consideration legacy applications, the company said, making it ideal for campus architectures.

"Through this unification, Juniper Networks is providing the building blocks for an enterprise-wide fabric, a key component in building a simple, secure and automated multicloud," the company said.

The update follows on last month's announcement that the company turned over its open source SDN Open Contrail project to The Linux Foundation and unveiled an expanded commercial enterprise offering based on the software, called Contrail Enterprise Multicloud.

Yesterday's announcement picked up on those initiatives. “Today’s announced campus and SD-WAN enhancements allow enterprises to bring best practices from the datacenter into their campuses, allowing them to more quickly realize secure and automated multicloud environments," the company said.

Specifically, the SD-WAN enhancements involve increased visibility and dynamic management of application session performance for thousands of unique applications -- including Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint and Skype for Business -- along with improvements to branch devices.

The company also announced: a new EX Series switch augmented with the aforementioned EVPN-VXLAN campus architecture; a reseller agreement with wireless specialist Aerohive Networks; and a five-step multicloud migration framework for campus and branch networks that provides a methods-driven approach to creating customized paths to multicloud implementations.

In a blog post, Juniper detailed how the announcements are designed to simplify and unify the different domains within networks on the journey toward multicloud. "Multicloud is an end-to-end, top-to-bottom proposition that requires a strong solution from datacenter to campus, from connectivity to orchestration and analytics," the company said.