“AI is going to reshape every industry and every job,” according to Reid Hoffman, Co-founder of LinkedIn, and your data center is the new battleground. This is where Juniper Networks shines, delivering the fastest, most secure, and easy to operate AI data center networks.
Juniper’s Data Center team recently spent time with 11 industry luminaries and practitioners at AI Infrastructure Field Day 2 (AIIFD2), demonstrating how businesses can “seize the moment” to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) data center infrastructure to take advantage of recent advancements in AI and machine learning (ML). It was an exciting event with fantastic engagement from the AIIFD delegates. “AI data center infrastructure needs some dense and fast networking. Juniper is going deep on designing that network,” claimed Alastair Cooke.
Juniper presented six sessions at AIIFD, diving into detail on AI data center networking and how Juniper innovations are helping our customers meet the moment for AI. AI is transforming every industry—but only if your data center can keep up. Here’s what you missed, and why it matters for your business:
1. AI Unbound: Your Data Center Your Way. The AI data center space is growing fast. Praful Lalchandani, VP of Product, Data Center Platforms and AI solutions, led off the day discussing market momentum, AI’s particular challenges, and how Juniper is helping our customers design, deploy, and operate AI infrastructure across training, inference, agentic, RAG, and more.
2. Maximize AI Cluster Performance with Juniper Self-Optimizing Ethernet. As AI workloads scale, performance metrics such as GPU utilization, congestion management, and token generation times determine ROI. Vikram Singh, Sr. Product Manager, AI Data Center Solutions, discussed Juniper’s advanced load balancing innovations, which deliver a self-optimizing Ethernet fabric that dynamically adapts to congestion and keeps your AI training and inference clusters running at peak efficiency. Learn why AI DC networks built with Juniper AI are superior to the costly, complex, proprietary solutions from other vendors. Brian Martin agrees with us that it’s “Exciting to see Juniper self-optimizing networks for AI.”
3. Securing AI Clusters: Juniper’s Approach to Threat Protection. AI workloads are high-value targets for cyber threats, requiring a defense-in-depth strategy to safeguard data, workloads, and infrastructure. Kedar Dhuru, Sr. Director, Product Management, highlighted how our security portfolio provides end-to-end protection for AI infrastructure—including multitenant environments—without compromising performance. Jim Czuprynski was “Glad to hear and see Juniper is definitely focusing on security and the possibilities for serious penetrations by bad actors … or just failures of imagination.”
4. GPYou: Building and operating your AI infrastructure. AI is a new domain, where there is no room for errors. But it’s also an urgent priority for businesses. IT organizations have all the responsibility, but no time to learn. They just need to do something—now. Kyle Baxter, Head of Apstra Product Management, showed the Juniper Apstra data center fabric management and assurance solution that guides customers through the novelty of AI data centers with proven, validated designs. Kyle started with Day 0, demonstrating how you can use Apstra to create a fully functional architecture in under five minutes, with native modeling of rail-optimized, and other designs. According to the delegate Jack Poller, “If you’re an architect, operator, enterprise, or CSP looking for essential tools to build and maintain the robust, high-performance, and secure network foundation that enables AI to thrive in today’s most demanding environments, you should investigate if Apstra can work for you.”
5. Day 1: Managing your AI data center. Moving on to Day 1, Apstra helps you configure with confidence, load balance AI/ML elephant flows, and handle congestion, whether your cluster is 1, 100, or 1000 GPUs. “It’s helping tame complexity in modern AI-driven infrastructure,” as Colleen Coll put it.
6. Day 2: Operating your AI data center. Jeremy Wallace, Director, Product Management, picked up with Day 2, sharing the latest Apstra functionality for AI data center network operations, including new compute agents deployable on NVIDIA servers to collect telemetry, new predefined probes and dashboards, and more. Juniper provides continuous validation of the intended design created in the initial blueprint. When something goes wrong, operators are immediately notified or in some cases, the problem is fixed automatically. Jack Poller remarked that “This approach is powered by a sophisticated contextual graph database that understands the relationships and intended state of every network element, cutting through the noise of raw data to provide meaningful context and pinpoint root causes of issues.” While other solutions overwhelm operators with information, Juniper provides you with insights, enabling rapid remediation. As Josh Warcop said, “It’s all about the context.”
Your AI data center, your way
We capped off the day with an exclusive, off-camera tour of the Juniper AI Lab in Sunnyvale where we showed our full stack, multivendor AI data center setups for customer proof-of-concepts. Customers often bring-their-own-model (BYOM) or bring-their-own-data (BYOD). We poke and prod and test models across multiple vendors and a variety of real-world scenarios, auto-tuning the infrastructure to drive optimal results.
The AIIFD2 sessions are all available online and we invite you to watch them to see what the delegates and over 2,100 viewers saw livestreamed.
Juniper would love the opportunity to speak with you and discuss how we can help you deploy and operate your data center, your way. We were recently recognized as a Leader in 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Data Center Switching. And in the companion Critical Capabilities™ report, Juniper was ranked #1 for Enterprise Data Center Buildout and #2 for AI Ethernet Fabric Buildout. We think we have the best data center networking products in the business. Ready to unleash AI’s full potential? Reach out to your local Juniper representative or contact us here to learn more.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Data Center Switching, Andrew Lerner, et al., 31 March 2025
Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Data Center Switching, Andrew Lerner, et al., 1 April 2025
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