Juniper extends Apstra software to the edge

Juniper Networks is extending its Apstra software platform to edge data centers with collapsed fabric topologies. The latest release of Apstra software also enables 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.

Specifically, 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.

Juniper said 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. 

“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.”

Juniper to acquire Apstra for Intent-Based networking and assurance

Monday, December 07, 2020  Apstra, Juniper  

Juniper Networks agreed to acquire Apstra, a start-up based in Menlo Park, California offering intent-based networking and automated closed loop assurance solutions. Financial terms were not disclosed.Apstra offers an intent-based network operating system for simplifying the management of data center networks. Intent-Based Networking (IBN) is a closed-loop, continuous validation approach to designing, deploying and managing infrastructure. Apstra...

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Juniper to acquire Apstra for Intent-Based networking and assurance

Juniper Networks agreed to acquire Apstra, a start-up based in Menlo Park, California offering intent-based networking and automated closed loop assurance solutions. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Apstra offers an intent-based network operating system for simplifying the management of data center networks. Intent-Based Networking (IBN) is a closed-loop, continuous validation approach to designing, deploying and managing infrastructure. Apstra automatically generates and deploys full configuration of all devices based on a service description, and continuously provides assurance checks between the intended and operational state. Apstra’s multivendor integrations extend its closed loop automation and analytics to customers independently of their underlying infrastructure, including those running SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud). 

Juniper said the acquisition expands its commitment to open programmability, adding to its portfolio of solutions that includes powerful switching platforms with native SONiC integration and a deployment-hardened, cloud-native routing stack for the SONiC ecosystem.<br>

"Juniper’s Data Center portfolio is consistently recognized by both analysts and customers as industry leading, with top marks for performance, scale, security and simplified operations through automation. Adding Apstra’s intent-based networking and automated closed loop assurance advances our vision to transform data center operations. With the combination of Juniper and Apstra, customers get the best infrastructure and fabric management with integrated design, deployment and automated root cause identification and remediation to satisfy any Data Center environment. This is networking for the modern cloud era,” stated Rami Rahim, CEO, Juniper Networks.

"We founded Apstra to automate the data center as a holistic system from its initial design to all aspects of its operation and maintenance. Our automation allows valuable network engineers to focus on strategic issues and avoid spending time on network configuration and troubleshooting, particularly with the attendant risk of human error. Joining Apstra with Juniper's strong reputation in networking and its commitment to open networking removes the long-standing tradeoff between manageability and vendor lock-in and advances the industry toward the true self-driving network, said David Cheriton, CEO and Co-Founder, Apstra.

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Apstra adds support for faster data center recovery, SONic

Apstra released a new version of is network operating system for simplifying the management of data center networks. Major enhancements in AOS 3.2 include:

• an Intent Time Voyager capability to decrease MTTR from network outages. This enables network engineers to recover their entire data center fabric state, configuration, and real time continuous validation to a specific point in time; backward or forward with a few clicks.  
• Intra and inter data center scale-out services - This includes the automation of EVPN DCI to allow VXLAN Data Center Interconnect with a simple, intuitive user interface and continuous DCI state validations. It also supports automation of EVPN VXLAN overlay across PODs in a 5-stage L3 Clos fabric, including continuous validations of BGP EVPN sessions and route expectations.
• Expanded enterprise-class open source Open Compute Project SONiC support
• Faster insights into the health and service assurance of network fabrics with customizable dashboards, probes, and widgets. Network operators can now create their own dashboards, probes, and widgets to get information about a large variety of parameters - such as device health, EVPN validations, throughput health, drain validation, traffic trends, virtual infrastructure redundancy checks, and fabric health for virtual infrastructures.

“Apstra AOS 3.2 is packed with innovative capabilities such as the industry’s first and only Intent Time Voyager capability which allows you to travel through the history of your network, and bring your network back to any known state in time helping to resolve network outages,” said Sean Hafeez, VP of Product at Apstra. “In addition, the latest product offers continued support for OCP SONiC, which enables network engineers to safely add newer OSS offerings to their networking toolkit.”

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Apstra accelerates NOS upgrades in multi-vendor networks

Apstra has updated its flagship AOS with the ability to automate and validate Network Operating System upgrades across an entire IP fabric. The new feature, which supports multiple vendors, ensures compliance and reduction in maintenance time from weeks or months to hours or days.

Apstra said it leverages a sophisticated, extensive automated testing platform that verifies the quality of the Apstra AOS software at scale, and models the different services and payloads. The company runs fifteen million unit tests per day, covering 600+ topologies, 100+ physical devices with a variety of hardware vendors, models, and chipsets (Arista, Cisco, Juniper, Dell, Edgecore, Mellanox, Quanta, Celestica, etc) as well as virtual appliances (vEOS, NXOSv, Cumulus, OPX, Ubuntu/CentOS). Any device in the data center can be connected to any other device (physical or virtual) through the use of a reservation system and an automated programmable L1/2 patch panel, which allows Apstra to replicate and test any customer topology in its own infrastructure prior to deployment.

As an example, Apstra said a major financial services company had a single engineer working on OS upgrades, taking upwards of eight months to upgrade 174 switches. The same tasks could have been completed with AOS Maintenance Mode and Device OS Upgrade in approximately 87 hours.

https://apstra.com

The dream of fully automated networks has been with us for decades, but with the rise of machine learning and virtualized network architecture, the industry finally appears ready to step ahead with Next Gen Network Automation.

In this series of videos, we speak with the thought leaders who are redefining the concept of automation. This 4-minute overview video gives us some high-level definitions:

See our full series of Thought Leadership videos, and download the exclusive report from our partner AvidThink, at https://nginfrastructure.com/network-automation/

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Apstra builds automation between physical network and SDN overlays

The latest release (3.1) of the Apstra Operating System (AOS) is introducing tighter design, build, and operational interoperability between the underlying physical network and software-defined overlay networks, including VMware NSX network virtualization.

Specifically, AOS 3.1 enables customers to confirm that any underlay network they design, deploy and operate meets several criteria to reliably support NSX including VLAN configurations, MTU settings, and LAG configurations. These validations occur both during the initial setup of the network along with continuous validation during ongoing operations.

Apstra said its operating system bridges the gap with the underlay and increases the simplicity of deploying network infrastructure with NSX. Key benefits include:

• Enterprises can bridge the network and security policy gaps between the physical underlay and virtual overlay to accelerate the delivery of business services.
• Enterprises can automate a consistent network and security policies across any vendor, any workload and any cloud.
• Enterprises can quickly troubleshoot and remediate problems.
• Multidomain Unified Group-Based Policy Enhancements -  This provides flexibility in policy enforcement and increases application availability. Full visualization of rules provides an enhanced view of the entire security posture.

“Customers that want to accelerate digital transformation require a software-defined network that spans all infrastructure and ties all these pieces together with one-click deployment,” said Nikhil Kelshikar, vice president of product management, networking and security at VMware. “Network virtualization offers the only practical way to provide this automated experience. NSX with Apstra AOS enables customers to treat the network infrastructure as code. This helps to accelerate deployments by bridging the gap with the physical underlay, reducing operational costs and simplifying troubleshooting.”

https://www.apstra.com/press/apstra-delivers-advanced-interoperability-with-vmware-nsx/

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Apstra publishes Intent-Based Taxonomy model

Apstra published an Intent-Based Taxonomy model to help network operators cut through the marketing hype.

“We are introducing a model intended to help CTOs and network operators evaluate and differentiate the maturity of IBN solutions with an objective set of criteria, beginning with Level 0 (low maturity/incomplete) offerings going up to Level 3 (mature/complete) offerings which enable companies to leverage full benefits of IBN approach,” said Sasha Ratkovic, CTO and Founder of Apstra.

Level 0 IBN: Basic Automation

These offerings have the ability to:

• Generate device configurations from declarative specifications. For example: scripts running Ansible modules or other declarative libraries such as NAPALM.
• Support a heterogeneous infrastructure.
• Ingest real-time network status in a protocol- and transport-agnostic way.
• At this level there is no presence of a single source of truth, which is a fundamental aspect of a mature IBN implementation, as it enables reasoning whether or not the intent has been met.

Level 1 IBN: Single Source of Truth

An implementation classified as Level 1 implements a single source of truth containing the intent and the network operational state. It contains data and state artifacts related to all aspects of a network service lifecycle: design, build, deploy, and validate. Level 1 can give you answers to important questions about the state of your intent and your infrastructure.

Level 2 IBN: Real-Time Change Validation

Building on top of Level 1, Level 2 IBN solution enables you to ask the right questions, at the right time to help assess the impact of business rule or policy changes, as well as the operational status changes and failures in real time.

Level 3 IBN: Self Operation

Does the IBN solution validate and close the loop between the intent and operational state by providing observability, and deliver corrective actions on a path to self-operating networks? This step is impossible to tackle if one has not built solid foundations in Levels 2 and 3.

http://blog.apstra.com/intent-based-networking-taxonomy?hs_preview=QVPEvKsI-5993347491

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Apstra Live Cisco Live Automating Lifecycle Data Center

Carly Stoughton, Head of Technical Marketing at Apstra, illustrates how Apstra AOS handles the entire data center network lifecycle, including Day 2 operations.

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Cisco Live 2018 Multi Tenant EVPN Automation with Apstra

One of Apstra's new features is support for automation of EVPN on top of your data center fabrics. To learn more, check out this video with Carly Stoughton recorded live at Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando.

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Apstra brings multi-tenant EVPNs to its network automation

Apstra released a new version of its intent-based distributed operating system that can automate multi-tenant EVPN across multiple vendors.

Apstra's AOS 2.2 introduces support for multi-tenancy and enhanced inter-rack L2 connectivity through Ethernet VPN (EVPN). EVPN provides a scalable control plane for VXLAN and enables a multi-tenant deployment via VRFs, creating multiple security zones. Apstra said its software automates all aspects of EVPN configuration and operations, across Cisco and Cumulus implementations, effectively providing an “easy button” for EVPN deployments.

This allows customers to continue to address their existing application connectivity requirements as they transition to modern L3 Leaf-Spine Clos architectures for better agility and scale.

Additional new and enhanced features in AOS 2.2 include:

• Intent-Based Analytics (IBA) enhancements, extensible telemetry, and blueprint discovery
• TACACS+ support and customizable RBAC roles – Provides integration with existing authentication systems and allow administrators to customize AOS roles to match organization requirements
• Audit trail – Allows customers to monitor login access to AOS and audit every single change for troubleshooting and compliance.
• Increased choice in hardware and software – including Dell EMC and Mellanox devices, OpenSwitch (OPX), the latest version of Cumulus (3.6), Ubuntu 16.04 for servers, including the Free-Range-Routing (FRR) routing stack.
• IPv6 Phase 1 – leverage IPv6 to conserve IPv4 space on fabric links.

“Organizations today require powerful automation that simplifies the operations of data center network infrastructure and enables network operators to conduct their business with confidence as they upgrade their data centers to meet the burgeoning demands of digital transformation, Internet of Things (IoT), and 5G,” said Mansour Karam, CEO and Founder of Apstra.

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Tier 1 Service Provider deploys OpenSwith + Intent-based Automation

Mansour Karam, CEO of Apstra, discusses the recent deployment by a Tier One Service Provider in the U.S. of OpenSwitch (OPX) on Dell Z9100-ON switches. The network is automated by Apstra's AOS, which provides an intent-based distributed operating system and a data center application suite for service agility, increased uptime and dramatically improved infrastructure TCO.

Filmed at NetEvents in San Jose, California.

See video:  https://youtu.be/QBVtss71x4k

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Apstra Demos Wedge Switch Running its OS

Apstra, a start-up based in Menlo Park, California, released its Apstra Operating System (AOS) 1.1.1 and an integration with Wedge 100, Facebook’s second generation top-of-rack network switch.

Apstra said its distributed operating system for the data center network will disaggregate the operational plane from the underlying device operating systems and hardware. Sitting above both open and traditional vendor hardware, AOS provides the abstraction required to automatically translate a data center network architect’s intent into a closed loop, continuously validated infrastructure. The intent, network configurations, and telemetry are stored in a distributed, system-wide state repository.

“At Apstra we believe in giving network engineers choice and control in operating their network and we are excited to be part of the network disaggregation movement,” said Mansour Karam, CEO and Founder of Apstra, Inc. “We are delighted to have been invited to demonstrate AOS integrated with Wedge 100 today. AOS provides network engineers with advanced operational control and situational awareness of network services, and enables them to design, deploy, and operate a truly Self-Operating Network™ (SON) without vendor lock-in.”

http://www.apstra.com

Facebook Deploys Backpack -- its 2nd Gen Data Center Switch

Tuesday, November 08, 2016  Data Centers, Facebook, Switch  No Comments

Facebook unveiled Backpack, its second-generation modular switch platform developed in house at Facebook for 100G data center infrastructure. It leverages Facebook's recently announced Wedge switch.

Backpack is designed with a clear separation of the data, control, and management planes. It uses simple building blocks called switch elements. The Backpack chassis is equivalent to a set of 12 Wedge 100 switches connected together. The orthogonal direct chassis architecture opens up more air channel space for a better thermal performance for managing the heat from 100G ASICs and optics.  Facebook will use the BGP routing protocol for the distribution of routes between the different line cards in the chassis.

The design has already entered production and deployment in Facebook data centers.  The company plans to submit the design to the Open Compute Project.

https://code.facebook.com/posts/864213503715814/introducing-backpack-our-second-generation-modular-open-switch/

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