Juniper Networks

With the belief that they exist to solve the world’s most difficult problems in networking technology, Juniper Networks brings simplicity to networking with products, solutions, and services that connect the world through Software-Defined Networking (SDN). A company of innovators, Juniper Networks believe that creating simplicity through engineering is the greatest form of innovation. Juniper is an advocate to the need to minimize the complexity of modern networks to overcome the today's challenges of 5G/ IoT-ready environments. Juniper Networks [NYSE: JNRP], an industry leader in automated, scalable and secure networks has over the recent past come up with solutions as a means to drive efficient and effective networking.

The firm enables customers to connect to everything and empower everyone in ways that have changed the world.

The Argument for SDN

As the speed of change increases, enterprises are turning to cloud for its promise of flexibility, limitless scale and agility. But the adoption of cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), or big data has had an extensive impact on IT infrastructures. Traditional methods of implementing networking and services in hardware make networks rigid, static and manual. These networks make it difficult to respond to changes that applications require and new applications are created and moved to disparate cloud environments. To build or move to cloud with least disruption, enterprises or businesses require architecting their networks to meet service, connectivity and security requirements for these dynamic applications. The aim is to make the networks programmable, policy-driven, scalable and automated for connecting ideas to opportunities.

The Cons

Though the SDN paradigm is a major turnaround for IT, cloud providers and enterprises, SDN comes with a set of challenges that hinders performance and implementation. From controller placement to scalability, performance to security, interoperability to reliability, the challenges are many; hence, SDN controllers have to be smartly and wisely configured. Also, SDN’s network topology has to be authenticated to avoid manual errors. In traditional methods of networking, if one or many network devices fail, the network data is routed through another for continuity of data flow, but in SDN, a central controller controls all networks, if it fails, the whole network collapses.

Given the exponential growth of connectivity spreading across devices, Juniper Networks believes that enterprise networks in the future will be an amalgamation of traditional networks and SDN and that SDN will deliver benefits when implemented rightly with the apt infrastructure

The potential barriers come with adopting SDN too, as security issues, lack of skilled employees, difficulty integrating with existing system become significant concerns.

Challenging the Status Quo

Juniper Networks challenges the status quo with their products, solutions and services that transform the economics of networking. The team co-innovates with customers and partners to deliver automated, scalable and secure networks with agility, performance and value.

Juniper’s approach to software-defined networking enables businesses and enterprises to develop an agile, open and elastic infrastructure based on freedom of choice, intelligent automation and always-on reliability. With Juniper’s SDN solutions, enterprises can evolve infrastructure to private, public, or hybrid clouds, introducing support for self-service, automated operations and service assurance. The firm’s SDN delivers numerous business benefits such as separation of the control and transport layers that escalates flexibility, accelerating time-to-market for new applications. Its ability to respond rapidly to problems enhances the availability of networks, and programmability enables IT organizations to automate network functions with a reduction in operating cost. These networks are also the exemplary platform for service providers to realize Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).

The firm’s open SDN solutions for cloud and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) help improve business agility with performance, automation, security, availability and elasticity. It delivers production-ready SDN solutions across numerous network domains. Existing infrastructures require no replacement, hence, making it easier for enterprises to reap the benefits of SDN while protecting their existing networking investments. Users can evade pricy vendor-lock-in with an open architecture that interoperates with a range of networking and service options: virtual or physical; implemented in software or hardware. This enables users to choose the best building blocks for their SDN solutions.

Contrail System and the New Levels of Control and Visibility

Juniper Network’s Contrail, an SDN-enabled management and control software, work’s with the firm’s existing network devices, delivering intelligent automation, application security, and reliability for cloud and NFV. The Contrail Enterprise Multicloud, a cloud-grade solution delivers application security, high-performance connectivity, and unified operability for enterprises, helping with networking challenges for automated, self-service and vertically integrated cloud architecture. From network virtualization and automation to turnkey cloud management platform, Contrail Cloud, an integrated telco cloud platform is built to run high performant NFV, enabling delivery of innovative and agile services. Delivering an automated multicloud SD-WAN, the Contrail SD-WAN helps enterprises create an evolvable architecture to simplify growth from SD-WAN to SD-Branch. It combines Contrail Service Orchestration with NFX Series, SRX Series, vSRX Virtual Firewall, and MX Series platforms for secure SD-WAN and SD-Branch. The Contrail Networking is future-proof for the cloud era building virtual networks from virtual machines (VMs) and bare-metal servers.

As network managers are required to move to efficient operational models, Juniper Networks automates the creation of traffic-engineering paths across networks through NorthStar Controller. A powerful and flexible toolset, NorthStar Controller increases network utilization, ensuring a customized programmable networking experience providing granular visibility into, and control over, IP/MPLS flows in enterprise networks and large service providers. Besides, the firm also provides a WANDL IP/MPLSView - a multivendor, multiprotocol, and multilayer operations support systems (OSS) traffic management and traffic engineering solution for IP and MPLS networks. Moreover, the firm’s NFX Series Network Services Platform - NFX150 and NFX250 – offers secure, standards-compliant CPE devices, simplifying the creation and delivery of network services.

Exponential Growth of SDN:

Given the exponential growth of connectivity spreading across devices, Juniper Networks believes that enterprise networks in the future will be an amalgamation of traditional networks and SDN and that SDN will deliver benefits when implemented rightly with the apt infrastructure. “We design solutions whose primary aim is to handle complexity so that you don’t have to. And if we are truly transformative in handling the complexity within our products and our solutions, what we provide to you becomes useful. It becomes elegant. It becomes… simple. And simple is powerful”, concludes Rahim. (https://forums.juniper.net/t5/The-New-Network/ Juniper-Networks-Engineering-Simplicity/ba-p/316518).