Juniper Networks this week introduced its intent to amass Apstra, a pioneer in knowledge heart intent-based networking (IBN). IBN has been gaining momentum in the course of the previous few years as organizations start to maneuver to totally autonomous networks.
While many of the mainstream community distributors have some variation of an IBN answer at this time, Apstra is the one one which works throughout a number of distributors. Apstra helps many of the mainstream community distributors, together with Juniper, Arista and Cisco Systems, but it surely additionally helps some alternate distributors akin to SONiC, Cumulus, NVIDIA and VMware. This lets Apstra prospects get pleasure from the advantages of IBN with out the worry of being locked right into a single vendor.
Although Apstra is a comparatively younger firm, based in 2014, it does have plenty of Fortune 100 prospects and repair suppliers, together with Bloomberg, Yahoo, Japan, BeElastic and T-Systems, which is a joint buyer with Juniper. Apstra was initially designed for massive prospects, and its options scale to 1000’s of community gadgets, whereas its give attention to ease of use is an effective match to all kinds of organizations–including mid-size companies–that want community automation.
Apstra delivers multi-vendor intent-based networking
Some of the IBN options are IBN in title solely and designed to automate the deployment (Day 0) and preliminary configuration (Day 1), however Apstra excels in totally automating Day 2 operations, giving it a product that works throughout the total lifecycle of community operations. I’ve talked to a few Apstra’s prospects, they usually rave about how simple it’s to make use of the product. Apstra is managed via an easy-to-use GUI that makes deployment easy and doesn’t require costly post-sales assist providers. One of the extra fascinating options is Apstra’s Intent Time Voyager, which allows prospects to roll again a portion or the entire community again to earlier states.
Apstra has a wealthy set of REST APIs that makes integration into self-service, DevOps and different instruments simple. Given Apstra’s system is closed-loop in nature, its knowledge set can be utilized as a single supply of fact. Typically, networks–particularly multi-vendor ones–have a number of knowledge silos with a number of administration consoles, which results in the “swivel chair” administration strategy, wherein community engineers should pivot between a number of administration consoles. Apstra applies machine studying to the one knowledge set to foretell issues, enabling them to be fastened earlier than they turn into enterprise impacting.
How Apstra rounds out Juniper’s AI networking capabilities
For Juniper, this acquisition matches completely and rounds out its self-driving community imaginative and prescient. In 2019, Juniper acquired Mist Systems, which had constructed a complicated AI system to automate WiFi operations. Since then, Juniper took the Mist capabilities and utilized them to the wired community, resulting in automation of a complete enterprise campus. Earlier this yr, Juniper pulled the set off on 128 Technology, which introduced it AI capabilities for the WAN. Juniper already had a powerful SD-WAN answer with Contrail, however the addition of 128 Technology has enabled Juniper to shift from SD-WAN to an AI-driven WAN.
Apstra addresses…
