Juniper Extends Contrail to Hybrid Clouds

Juniper Networks today extended the scope of its management ambitions to provide multi-domain cloud orchestration capabilities across on-premises IT environments and public clouds using the Contrail Enterprise software-defined network (SDN) platform.

This is an important move to enable the control of networking across hybrid cloud environments. The latest edition of Juniper's Contrail Enterprise makes it possible to apply policies across virtual machines, bare metal servers, containers, and network devices on an end-to-end basis.

The ambitious effort also aims to unify the management of network overlays and the underlays. It enables both real-time infrastructure performance monitoring (IPM) for datacenter networking devices as well as cloud infrastructure and application monitoring.

The goal is to enable IT organizations to centrally manage policies across an extended enterprise from one central console, says Mike Bushong, vice president of enterprise cloud marketing for Juniper Networks. The basic idea is to enable polices to be attached and then follow workloads wherever they wind up running, says Bushong.

“We’re unifying policy management,” says Bushong, and this could make it simpler to manage those multi-cloud environments. Part of the new push includes a five-step multicloud migration framework that identifies best practices and technologies for securing and automating the management of multicloud environments.

Juniper Networks has now also begun to bundle its QFX Series Switches with Contrail Enterprise Multicloud and developed a professional services capability to accelerate redesigns of datacenters based on turnkey processes and tooling for network implementation and test automation.

Bushong says that rather than thinking about policy automation on an end-to-end basis, IT organizations need to also think up and down the stack. As the IT environment becomes more diverse, policies need to be consistently applied to hypervisors, containers, and increasingly bare-metal servers spanning multiple types and classes of implementations.

Of course, Juniper Networks is not the only IT vendor with similar IT management ambitions. But Contrail Enterprise is a clear indication that providers of traditional networking equipment are firmly focused on providing value way beyond traditional networking services.