News

Juniper Expands SDN-Based Contrail Enterprise Multicloud

• By David Ramel
• 05/07/2018

Juniper Networks, having turned over its open source, software-defined networking (SDN) Open Contrail project to The Linux Foundation, has come out with an expanded commercial enterprise offering based on the software.

Called Contrail Enterprise Multicloud, the company said it's designed to help organizations enable end-to-end policy and control capabilities for all workloads in physical and virtual environments, on any cloud and across multivendor environments.

Early last month, Juniper donated the SDN-based OpenContrail project to open source steward The Linux Foundation.

OpenContrail -- now called Tungsten Fabric under the Foundation umbrella -- was described as a scalable network virtualization control plane that provides both feature-rich SDN and strong security, boasting features such as: routing and switching; network services; load balancing; security and policies; performance and scale; gateway services; rich analytics; service chaining; high availability and upgrades; and APIs and orchestrations.

The new commercial offering adds capabilities to that core technology to provide a simpler enterprise solution for complicated environments.

"Most enterprises have to resort to two or more controllers or management systems to manage overlay, underlay and network devices," the company said. "With Contrail Enterprise Multicloud's new multidomain orchestration and advanced analytics capabilities, enterprises can now manage and monitor workload policies from a single command center. This means that enterprises leveraging multiple cloud environments -- either public, private or both-- now have a policy orchestration solution built on a single platform with a single point of control, providing a cohesive multicloud-ready infrastructure."

The overlay functionality is especially drawn from the open source project. "The software-defined networking (SDN) capability, based on the open source network virtualization project, Tungsten Fabric, enables you to deploy your workloads in any environment," the enterprise site says. "It offers continuous overlay connectivity to any workload running on any compute technologies from networking devices to bare metal servers, virtual machines, and containers."

Features of the enterprise offering are said to include: cloud-native application support; traffic flow visualization, unified policy, support of open standards and interfaces; an analytics collection framework, intent-driven architecture, natural language processing; and more.

To help enterprises get started with the multicloud evolution, Juniper also unveiled a 5-step multicloud migration framework that provides guidance such as a set of best practices, natural technology insertions and recommended products and services.

Juniper didn't provide pricing information, inviting interested enterprises to request a quote.