Juniper Networks enhances Apstra Software

Juniper Networks has introduced new enhancements to the Juniper Apstra platform that further simplify the deployment, troubleshooting and operations of data center networks. With the latest Apstra software release, Juniper’s enterprise, service provider and cloud provider customers can now extend Apstra’s intent-based networking capabilities to edge data centers with collapsed fabric topologies. Additionally, customers can utilize Apstra software to enable tighter Zero Trust security with new policy assurance and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) capabilities as well as simplified migration from legacy data centers with new Apstra professional services.  

“With the latest enhancements to our Apstra software platform, we are continuing our commitment to putting user and operator experiences at the forefront of everything we do,” said Mike Bushong, VP of Data Center Product Management at Juniper Networks. “Apstra uniquely provides a single solution for the design, deployment and operations of data center networks in multivendor environments, leveraging true intent-based networking to maximize data center reliability with automation and assurance. The newest features enable us to double down on these core architectural differences, bringing reliability, simplicity and security to even more use cases and environments.”

Edge data center support assures reliable operations everywhere

Enterprises and service providers are increasingly deploying small data centers at the network edge. New use cases, such as industrial automation and augmented reality, are driving a need to bring data processing closer to the end user to minimize application latency and improve reliability and user experience. Processing data at the edge can save substantial networking costs by eliminating the need to send traffic back to centralized cloud data centers.

To address these trends, Apstra’s edge deployment model supports collapsed fabric topologies, commonly used in smaller, remote edge data centers. With this new model, customers utilize a simple platform to reliably manage intent-based networking and analytics – from small edge data centers to large, centralized sites – using a single source of truth. Extending Apstra to edge data centers allows organizations to benefit from intent-based networking and analytics in smaller deployments that don’t need the scale of a large, centralized data center.

Policy assurance provides Zero Trust security across the network

Juniper’s data center offering, in conjunction with the company’s Connected Security portfolio, delivers a wide range of protections for the Zero Trust data center, including workload protection, threat intelligence and prevention, unified policy management and network segmentation and isolation at scale. Apstra provides a multitude of security benefits for data center fabrics, including intent-based policy assurance for consistent and accurate policy enforcement and continuous validation across vendors, easy-to-use blueprints and templates for securing the data center and robust audit trails.

The latest version of Apstra provides policy assurance to enable granular enforcement where needed for greater scalability and efficiency, connectivity restrictions for multi-tenant environments and a wide array of RBAC and assurance. Apstra can detect security policy conflicts and duplicated rules, alerting users with actionable suggestions for resolution.

Apstra Professional Services simplify deployment and migration

Juniper’s new migration services provide a rapid and reliable way for customers to transition from legacy data center architectures to modern environments that benefit from Apstra’s intent-based networking and assurance. 

By leveraging Apstra’s intent-based networking architecture and automation tools, Juniper’s professional services team can perform real-time, preconditioned validations based on the exact blueprints, network models and operating systems. This enables customers to migrate to Apstra with minimal downtime while reducing the CapEx and OpEx associated with physical and virtual testing during migration. In addition, customers can utilize Juniper experts, best practice design methodologies and in-house automation tools to accelerate deployments for a high degree of assurance, increased business agility, accelerated deployments and drastically reduced risk.