@Juniper Networks today rolled out @Contrail Enterprise Multi-Cloud, which it’s positioning as a more open alternative to Cisco’s ACI and @VMware’s #NSX. Juniper’s technology controls both the underlying devices of the data center infrastructure as well as the policy control overlay. “We’re unifying the underlay and overlay into a single controller, whether an enterprise is looking for device or fabric management or overlay policy and control,” said Mike Bushong, Juniper’s VP of enterprise cloud marketing. Related Articles Service Providers Race Toward Network Automation, Incredible Hulk Style Verizon Sees Fixed 5G Opportunity Where AT&T Does Not Nokia Stumbles Out of the Blocks, But Is Upbeat on 5G, Rival Woes Your Data Center Needs a Network Time Machine How to Make Money in SDN He said Contrail Enterprise Multi-Cloud is somewhat comparable to Cisco’s ACI and “its APIC controller that manages the underlay and overlay.” But he added, “We’re more open to multi-vendor. Our goal is to make it so enterprises can move to multi-cloud. The days when you’re going to have an end-to-end solution with proprietary control, those days are over.” Contrail Enterprise Multi-Cloud enables policy and control capability for any workload across multi-vendor networking environments and most server deployments in any clouds whether public, private, or both. Contrail At the end of 2017, Juniper moved its OpenContrail software-defined networking (SDN) controller to the Linux Foundation. And the project has since been renamed Tungsten Fabric and become part of the Linux Foundation Networking Fund (LFN). Juniper plans to continue participating in the open-source Tungsten Fabric project and mirror its updates in its commercial Contrail products. “We’ll be one of the biggest consumers of Tungsten Fabric,” said Randy Bias, VP of technology and strategy at Juniper Networks. The company has architected its Contrail Enterprise Multi-Cloud to support multi-vendor environments based on open interfaces and standard protocols. “When you look at data center and IP fabrics, you’ve got to have a way of stitching these together,” said Bushong. In addition to overlay and fabric orchestration, the software provides a single tool to manage bare metal servers, traditional networking devices, virtual machines, containers, private and public clouds, and security software. It also provides real-time infrastructure performance monitoring for data center networking devices as well as application monitoring. Today’s news from Juniper is the latest in its roll-out of a multi-cloud strategy. Earlier this year, the company announced several products focused on connectivity. “We asserted in February that multi-cloud needed to be end-to-end,” said Bushong. “But today we’re saying it also needs to be top-to-bottom; the underlying connectivity but also visibility, security, and orchestration.” While today’s announcement was about the data center, Bushong hinted that the next piece of Juniper’s strategy would be about a multi-cloud strategy in other places. “Migration has to happen across the data center, branch, and public cloud,” he said. “Juniper is committed to the secure, multi-cloud journey.”
