Juniper Networks Aims to Unite Network Management

Juniper Networks, under the auspices of a Unite Cloud initiative, has been moving to centralize the management of remote offices and campus networks. Today, Juniper Networks announced it is now extending the reach of that effort into the data center.

Scott Miles, senior director of cloud, enterprise and security portfolio marketing at Juniper, says Juniper Networks Unite Cloud makes use of an update to Junos Space Network Director and provides the means through which IT organizations via a single pane of glass can now manage remote offices, campus networks and the data center.

Junos Space Network Director 3.0 automates the provisioning of network virtualization overlays in a way that automates network configurations all the way down to the port level. Miles notes that as IT becomes distributed across multiple clouds, there’s a clear need to unify management across different network silos to simultaneously reduce costs and increase scale.

“From an operational perspective, the line needs to evaporate,” says Miles.

To facilitate that process, Juniper Networks today also added a 100G Juniper Networks QFX5110 switch in anticipation of increased demand for more bandwidth inside the data center. It may by a while before most enterprise IT organizations get around to deploying 100G switches in the data center. But the one thing that is clear is that there is a direct correlation between the number of virtual networks being spun up and the number of virtual machines and containers such as Docker being deployed in the data center. As the sheer volume of those deployments increases, it’s only a matter of time before there’s more contention for bandwidth.

In the meantime, IT organizations are increasingly starting to view networks as virtual entities spanning multiple clouds in much the same way they already view servers. The challenge is finding a way to virtually manage it all as well.