Juniper Networks has announced Apstra Freeform, the newest expansion to its multivendor data center automation and assurance platform. This capability allows Juniper’s enterprise, service provider and cloud provider customers to manage and automate their data center operations regardless of topology and protocols used.
Network operations are rapidly evolving. Whether it’s managing the effects of a global supply chain crunch or coping with changes in the workforce spurred by the pandemic, organisations of all sizes and sectors face architectural questions that will shape how they build their data centers. Sole sourcing will become multivendor, configuration will become intent-driven and root-cause identification and remediation will become automated. Apstra Freeform aims to unify experiences across vendors and automate key data center workflows as the single source of truth for data center configuration.
“Apstra continues to emphasise the importance of reliable and consistent multivendor data center operations,” said Mike Bushong, Group VP of Data Center Product Management at Juniper Networks. “With the introduction of Freeform, we are expanding operational efficiency further into the market. Freeform brings full control of the network design into the hands of data center operators, giving them complete flexibility and versatility. Without topology constraints, we are truly democratising intent-based networking and allowing everyone to benefit from the best operational practices in the cloud era.”
“Atos has enjoyed a partnership with Juniper for over ten years. As a global system integrator, we give our clients business plasticity to change, adapt and innovate with velocity, creating standard multi-partner, repeatable data center network architectures. Data center reference designs within Apstra allow us to deploy and operate partner agnostic data center network fabrics quickly, automatically and seamlessly. Atos supports customers in many verticals and, occasionally, requirements dictate different network architectures. With Apstra Freeform, we’re able to automatically build different architectures and still operate them using Apstra. Flexible vendor agnostic network architectures with Apstra’s reliability, simplicity, telemetry and intent networking are an excellent enhancement to the Apstra platform.” said Lee Wright, VP CTO Infrastructure, Atos.
“Apstra’s unique ability to manage multivendor environments gives our customers the strategic flexibility to use hardware from different vendors. Freeform introduces additional capabilities to employ Apstra over a range of different data center designs, all packaged with a licensing model built for scale.” said David Brady, EVP, Myriad360.
“Data center operations teams are confronting challenges and complexity on multiple fronts: the pressure to make network operations simpler and more agile through extensive automation; supply chain disruptions that affect availability of infrastructure and timing of refresh schedules; the complexity of heterogenous application environments and infrastructure; and skills gaps that inhibit how quickly existing personnel can adapt to change. With the release of Freeform, Juniper Apstra is helping customers address these challenges by investing Apstra’s full-lifecycle intent-based network management with a greater degree of versatility to accommodate a broader array of protocols and topologies.” said Brad Casemore, Research Vice President, Datacenter and Multicloud Networks, IDC.
