Juniper upgrades data centre assurance with AI & new features

Juniper Networks has announced enhancements to its data centre assurance capabilities, which the company claims will significantly improve user experiences through increased network visibility, analysis and automation.

The upgrades to Juniper’s data centre networking solution include new cloud-hosted services leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) for networking. These services aim to provide enhanced insights into application behaviours, whether traditional or related to emerging AI workloads, thus aiding ongoing optimisation and rapid troubleshooting.

New services include Service Awareness and Impact Analysis. Service Awareness employs AI for IT operations (AIOps) to add application and service data to Juniper’s network knowledge graph, enhancing application-to-network visibility. “Service Awareness increases the understanding of where applications and services attach, how they communicate across the network, and what resources they consume, providing direct insights and supporting additional assurance capabilities,” Juniper stated.

Impact Analysis is designed to enable faster troubleshooting, issue resolution, and improved application assurance. The service maps identified issues to their impacts using AI and machine learning (AI/ML), allowing a clearer picture of which issues affect applications and which are unrelated. This feature also includes state comparison between different times to improve identification and resolution of transient issues.

Juniper claims these new capabilities could help to reduce deployment times by up to 85 percent and cut operational expenditure (OPEX) by up to 90 percent in some cases. The company is also continuing its investment in intent-based networking to improve operator experience and further optimise application performance. Version 5.0 of Juniper Apstra, a seamless upgrade for existing users, adds over 100 new features aimed at simplifying data centre operations further.

Enhancements in Juniper Apstra include expanded environmental telemetry data covering traffic, switch health, optics, power supplies, fans and temperature, to aid in troubleshooting. Additionally, enhanced Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN) analytics are expected to simplify complex EVPN operations, while intent-based analytics offer easy buttons, visual guides and more for turning raw data into actionable insights more rapidly.

Matt Schroeder, Network Engineering Manager at Avera Health, a nonprofit health system, commented on the benefits of Juniper’s solutions: “Juniper’s intent-based networking solution previously improved reliability and simplified the operations of our data centre infrastructure. Now we’re also using the new cloud services and AIOps capabilities and we've seen early success. We are excited to use the new application assurance capabilities and expect them to help make the employee and patient experience even better.”

Mark Leary, Research Director, Network Observability & Automation at IDC, highlighted the challenges faced by modern networks and the relief provided by Juniper’s advancements: “Today’s hyper-connected digital business environment is placing more and more pressure on the network and networking staff. The AIOps advancements, intent-based networking and application intelligence provide much-needed relief for these pressures by bolstering the resiliency and responsiveness of the network infrastructure, enabling a more precise and proactive approach to network management.”

Vince Trama, Chief Revenue Officer at Presidio, noted the growing customer adoption of Apstra to optimise data centre operations and the expected impact of the new capabilities: “The new cloud and AIOps capabilities will further solidify the operational value Juniper brings to NetDevOps teams while helping Presidio deliver automated, scalable, easy-to-deploy and manage data centre networking solutions to our customers.”

Praveen Jain, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Data Centre, Juniper Networks, asserted the strength of Juniper’s integrated technologies. “We’ve developed industry-leading AIOps capabilities driven by Mist AI and powerful intent-based networking capabilities with Apstra. These two technologies integrated together deliver an unbeatable experience for our customers that operate data centres. The addition of new cloud and AI capabilities with Apstra Cloud Services will further extend the strength of our data centre solution.”