The Open Cloud Network Journey Begins Today with Juniper ContrailThe Open Cloud Network Journey Begins Today with Juniper Contrail

Juniper Networks reached a major milestone in our software-defined networking (SDN) roadmap. We made4 key announcements. We announced the production-ready availability of Juniper Networks Contrail, our SDN controller, and introduced an open-source version of the same controller, OpenContrail. We also unveiled a number of partnerships to help support the adoption of the technology that promises to reshape the industry. In our material about the new product, you will see that we talk about “bringing networking into the cloud era.” I want to take a moment and explain what that really means for our customers.

Both enterprises and services providers are looking to the cloud to help them move their businesses forward, but for very different reasons. For enterprises, the cloud makes workloads and applications more dynamic. Before organizations can take advantage of that benefit, they need an infrastructure that is optimized for private and public cloud services. For service providers, either traditional network service providers or cloud service providers, they need a quick way to deliver new services and increase the time to revenue.

What does this have to do with networking? Two key tenets of the cloud are flexibility and multi-tenancy. Today’s organizations need to spin up resources on demand and securely segment traffic. Fundamentally, these are networking challenges. The network has to provide connectivity, dynamically and on-demand, and it needs to do it securely. Because the networking capabilities in traditional virtualization and cloud software stacks are rather rudimentary, a lot of the heavy lifting gets pushed to the physical network. Multi-tenancy is most often accomplished by configuring VLANs on physical switches, which limits scale and flexibility, while also making the physical network more complex.
Introducing Juniper Networks Contrail , our SDN solution which now helps extend advanced IP networking capabilities into the virtual world. Contrail can dynamically create virtual networks via a hypervisor, connecting virtualized resources both to each other and to the physical network. Contrail is unique in that the standard protocols used to do this are no different than the ones used in physical networks worldwide i.e. BGP, MPLS, XMPP, etc., hence it can integrate seamlessly with any infrastructure

Juniper is building on our heritage and expertise in networking and combining that experience with cloud technologies like virtualization and a scale out architecture. The company is known as an innovator in the networking industry for bringing together physical infrastructures with market-leading routing, switching and security portfolios. It’s time to extend the innovation into software and the virtual world with Contrail.

Contrail delivers proven, stable networking protocols and a rich set of networking capabilities at the virtual layer, making it unlike other SDN solutions on the market today. Juniper now offers an open, simple to deploy and agile networking platform that brings networking into the cloud era.
 
What does Contrail offer to our Customers

Contrail helps enterprises deploy hybrid cloud scenarios, so they can dynamically shift workloads and applications between private and public clouds.  Read more on how enterprises can use Contrail.

For Service Providers, Contrail has the ability to dynamically spin up and chain together virtualized services, which is important to network operators looking to adopt network functions virtualization (NFV). Through seamless integration with Juniper Networks’ flagship virtual firewall, Firefly, Contrail provides unparalleled performance, scale and coverage across virtualized data centers. Read more on how Service Providers can use Contrail.

A Little Help from Our Friends

Juniper also announced partnerships with several leading technology providers who are integrating their applications and services with Contrail. With this integration, customers can get simplified orchestration, provisioning and management of service-chained virtual and physical security services.  We see customers looking at Contrail in conjunction with these other services as a way to move the managed services that are presently delivered on physical CPE devices (NAT, Firewall, etc.) into the network to be run as virtualized services.

Ultimately, customers are looking for a way to automate this virtual stack and connect it to cloud orchestration platforms. We have enabled Contrail to integrate with the REST API via Openstack and  Apache CloudStack. We have partnerships with several cloud orchestration partners – Red Hat, Citrix, Cloudscaling, Mirantis and Canonical, as well as a strategic partnership with IBM Smart Cloud Orchestrator, one of the world’s largest Openstack implementations.

The best part of the announcement is our customers are excited to talk about their Contrail beta deployments. We have case studies from SunGard, ISPRIME, Jaguar Network, and one of the largest telecom providers. All the customer case studies are available here, including an overview of how Contrail is helping them solve their most pressing business challenges.

Juniper made networking history with Contrail and OpenContrail because of the offering’s ability to bring networks into the cloud and offer customers a true Simple, Open, and Agile platform for innovation.

Bring ON the next era of networking!Juniper Networks reached a major milestone in our software-defined networking (SDN) roadmap. We made4 key announcements. We announced the production-ready availability of Juniper Networks Contrail, our SDN controller, and introduced an open-source version of the same controller, OpenContrail. We also unveiled a number of partnerships to help support the adoption of the technology that promises to reshape the industry. In our material about the new product, you will see that we talk about “bringing networking into the cloud era.” I want to take a moment and explain what that really means for our customers.

Both enterprises and services providers are looking to the cloud to help them move their businesses forward, but for very different reasons. For enterprises, the cloud makes workloads and applications more dynamic. Before organizations can take advantage of that benefit, they need an infrastructure that is optimized for private and public cloud services. For service providers, either traditional network service providers or cloud service providers, they need a quick way to deliver new services and increase the time to revenue.

What does this have to do with networking? Two key tenets of the cloud are flexibility and multi-tenancy. Today’s organizations need to spin up resources on demand and securely segment traffic. Fundamentally, these are networking challenges. The network has to provide connectivity, dynamically and on-demand, and it needs to do it securely. Because the networking capabilities in traditional virtualization and cloud software stacks are rather rudimentary, a lot of the heavy lifting gets pushed to the physical network. Multi-tenancy is most often accomplished by configuring VLANs on physical switches, which limits scale and flexibility, while also making the physical network more complex.
Introducing Juniper Networks Contrail , our SDN solution which now helps extend advanced IP networking capabilities into the virtual world. Contrail can dynamically create virtual networks via a hypervisor, connecting virtualized resources both to each other and to the physical network. Contrail is unique in that the standard protocols used to do this are no different than the ones used in physical networks worldwide i.e. BGP, MPLS, XMPP, etc., hence it can integrate seamlessly with any infrastructure

Juniper is building on our heritage and expertise in networking and combining that experience with cloud technologies like virtualization and a scale out architecture. The company is known as an innovator in the networking industry for bringing together physical infrastructures with market-leading routing, switching and security portfolios. It’s time to extend the innovation into software and the virtual world with Contrail.

Contrail delivers proven, stable networking protocols and a rich set of networking capabilities at the virtual layer, making it unlike other SDN solutions on the market today. Juniper now offers an open, simple to deploy and agile networking platform that brings networking into the cloud era.
 
What does Contrail offer to our Customers

Contrail helps enterprises deploy hybrid cloud scenarios, so they can dynamically shift workloads and applications between private and public clouds.  Read more on how enterprises can use Contrail.

For Service Providers, Contrail has the ability to dynamically spin up and chain together virtualized services, which is important to network operators looking to adopt network functions virtualization (NFV). Through seamless integration with Juniper Networks’ flagship virtual firewall, Firefly, Contrail provides unparalleled performance, scale and coverage across virtualized data centers. Read more on how Service Providers can use Contrail.

A Little Help from Our Friends

Juniper also announced partnerships with several leading technology providers who are integrating their applications and services with Contrail. With this integration, customers can get simplified orchestration, provisioning and management of service-chained virtual and physical security services.  We see customers looking at Contrail in conjunction with these other services as a way to move the managed services that are presently delivered on physical CPE devices (NAT, Firewall, etc.) into the network to be run as virtualized services.

Ultimately, customers are looking for a way to automate this virtual stack and connect it to cloud orchestration platforms. We have enabled Contrail to integrate with the REST API via Openstack and  Apache CloudStack. We have partnerships with several cloud orchestration partners – Red Hat, Citrix, Cloudscaling, Mirantis and Canonical, as well as a strategic partnership with IBM Smart Cloud Orchestrator, one of the world’s largest Openstack implementations.

The best part of the announcement is our customers are excited to talk about their Contrail beta deployments. We have case studies from SunGard, ISPRIME, Jaguar Network, and one of the largest telecom providers. All the customer case studies are available here, including an overview of how Contrail is helping them solve their most pressing business challenges.

Juniper made networking history with Contrail and OpenContrail because of the offering’s ability to bring networks into the cloud and offer customers a true Simple, Open, and Agile platform for innovation.

Bring ON the next era of networking!