Juniper Networks’ Cloud-Ready Data Center (CRDC) team recently spent time with 12 industry luminaries and practitioners at Cloud Field Day 18 (CFD18), demonstrating how we make private data center infrastructure “as easy as cloud”. It was an exciting event with fantastic engagement from the CFD delegates. Keith Townsend (aka, the CTO Advisor) claimed that “Juniper Networks’ Apstra automation platform represents a significant step in making private data centers operate similarly to the public cloud. Its intent-based networking, multivendor support, centralized management and closed-loop automation features provide valuable tools for organizations seeking greater agility and efficiency.”
Juniper presented four sessions at CFD18 diving into more detail on secure, automated data centers and AI data center networking:
- Private Data Center as Easy as Cloud: Mansour Karam, GVP Data Center Products, discussed how the evolution of the internet over the last 20 years led Juniper Apstra to an operations-first approach to transform the data center network. This motivated Mansour and team to invent intent-based networking (IBN), which has revolutionized the way that customers manage the entire data center lifecycle, from Day 0/Design to Day 1/Deployment and Day 2+/Operations. But artificial intelligence (AI) is now all the rage and the combination of IBN and AIOps in the data center will be seismic. Juniper is also helping customers around the world navigate the “other” AI challenge in the data center: building DC infrastructure to run AI/ML workloads, such as large language models (LLMs). With the data center at the heart of one of the most exciting areas in technology, we’re committed to making yours a success.
- Cloud Style On-Premises Networking: Many of the new “network engineers” today are not “networking by birth”, they are “cloud by birth”, meaning they’re more likely to know HashiCorp® Terraform® instead of Cisco, Arista or Juniper CLI. Chris Marget, Sr. Product Manager, demonstrated how data center (DC) operators can achieve public cloud-like service consumption on premises by using Apstra and Terraform to automate end-to-end application creation. Through a sample app deployment, he showed how the HashiCorp Terraform Provider for Apstra fits traditionally complex network services, like EVPN, neatly into a predefined application automation. The attendees learned how the Apstra Terraform Provider allows application owners to self-serve network services in a familiar way, providing seamless deployments across any infrastructure. “Nerdy” Nathan Bennett remarked that “the demonstration. . . was absolutely insane!”
- Automating AI Data Center Design with Apstra: While Apstra is excellent for running traditional data centers that support standard applications and workloads, it’s also excellent for new AI clusters. James Kelly, Sr. Director PLM, CRDC, showed how to “Terraform-apply” to seamlessly import AI cluster designs into Apstra. Designs included different sizes of storage fabrics, management fabrics and GPU compute fabrics for AI model training and inference. The logical rack types followed NVIDIA best practices for a rail-optimized design with a topology of eight GPU servers connected to a “stripe” of eight leaf switches.
- How to Be a Data Center Analytics Superhero: Telemetry is the lifeblood of DC operations, but it means nothing if you cannot extract the data into meaningful analytics. Kyle Baxter, Sr. Product Manager, and Rajeev Menon Kadekuzhi, Software Engineering Sr. Manager, dove into how users can enhance Apstra’s extensive, pre-built intent-based analytics (IBA) with custom collectors and dashboards. During the demonstration, they showed how to collect valuable data, enrich it with knowledge from the vast Apstra graph database and create new visualizations, plus custom alerts to provide better insights and information about data centers or new AI clusters.
Private Data Center as Easy as Cloud
The sessions are all available online and we invite you to watch them to see what the delegates and over 600 live viewers saw livestreamed from CFD18. In addition, here is a sample of some of what some of the delegates thought:
- Taking Private Cloud to the Next Level
- Enabling the Magic of Cloud on Premises with Juniper Apstra
- Cloud Field Day Report: Juniper Networks Delivers Automation for the AI Era
- Juniper Apstra at Cloud Field Day 18
- Juniper Networks IaC Apstra
- Juniper – Building AI Clusters
- Juniper – Being an Operations Superhero
Juniper would love the opportunity to speak with you and discuss making your private data center infrastructure as easy as cloud. Feel free to reach out to your local Juniper representative or contact us here. In the meantime, for more information, visit the AI Data Center Networking and Apstra pages on juniper.net.
