As CIO of a leading technology company, I have a front-row seat to the ever-increasing demands placed on our IT infrastructure. Business agility and artificial intelligence (AI) are not buzzwords; they’re core to how organizations stay competitive in a fast-changing world. O Data centers, the very heart of operations, need to scale seamlessly, operate efficiently, and provide a robust foundation for our innovations.
Over the past few years, Juniper IT has embarked on a significant journey to transform our own data center networking. We faced familiar challenges: the need for rapid capacity expansion to support business growth, the drain on our IT admins’ productivity due to manual configurations and cumbersome processes, and a lack of end-to-end visibility that hampered troubleshooting and prevented proactive issue resolution.
Our solution has been a strategic embrace of Juniper’s own cutting-edge technologies, specifically the combination of Juniper Apstra ® Data Center Director for data center fabric management and full lifecycle automation and Juniper ® Data Center Assurance for enhanced visibility and AIOps. The results have been nothing short of transformative.
Delivering operational agility at scale
In today’s fast-paced business environment, agility and efficiency are paramount. CIOs must empower their IT teams to respond quickly to changing demands, scale resources effectively, and streamline operations to maximize productivity. Juniper IT faced challenges in this area. We needed to expand data center capacity to support business growth but were hindered by manual configurations, scripts, and cumbersome processes that reduced IT admin productivity.
Apstra Data Center Director and Juniper Validated Designs have revolutionized our data center operations, automating the complex process of migrating from our legacy centrally-routed bridging (CRB) to an edge-routed bridging (ERB) fabric and adding new capacity. Data Center Director automation helped us cut a four-month process down to just two weeks, unlocking faster time to value and ongoing efficiency gains for our IT administrators. The outcome is a far more reliable data center with streamlined operations. Beyond speed, the new ERB fabric has also enhanced the stability and resilience of our environment, demonstrably improving our network availability by minimizing session disconnects during maintenance and ensuring non-disruptive upgrades. Data Center Director’s ability to deliver reliable automation and scale frees up our teams to focus on higher-value, strategic work.
Maximizing productivity with AI and proactive operations
AI is fundamentally reshaping data center operations, presenting unparalleled opportunities to amplify productivity, enhance operational visibility, and proactively mitigate potential disruptions. Juniper IT’s previous challenges—like a lack of contextual awareness and reliance on time-consuming, reactive troubleshooting—underscored the critical need for AI-native solutions.
Our strategic adoption of Juniper Data Center Assurance has been a key differentiator. It goes beyond surfacing data—it delivers actionable insights. Unlike other tools we’ve worked with that overwhelm with raw information, Data Center Assurance takes us straight to the issue. When you’re in troubleshooting mode, that speed and clarity makes all the difference. We don’t have to sift through dashboards and interpret logs to find the source of a problem. With Data Center Director and Data Center Assurance, we get directed to the root cause, fast.
The platform’s Impact Analysis capability empowers IT teams to assess the potential effects of network modifications or maintenance on applications, services, and clients—preventing costly disruptions before they occur. It also provides continuous oversight of network integrity, ensuring unwavering stability and optimal performance.
The enhanced visibility and troubleshooting features offer deep insight into network traffic—such as identifying which clients and applications are connected to specific network file system (NFS) servers and services—but without requiring teams to piece everything together manually. The system also analyzes service dependencies to improve resource allocation and streamline maintenance planning.
The ability to predict, pinpoint, and resolve issues quickly has been a game-changer for our team—elevating productivity and boosting our confidence in the stability of our infrastructure.
Achieving end-to-end visibility
The increasing complexity of modern digital environments necessitates comprehensive end-to-end visibility for effective management and accelerated troubleshooting. Our requirement was a unified view that extended across our wired and wireless campus networks, through the wide area network (WAN), and all our data centers and pods. We achieved this by implementing the Marvis® AI Assistant.
Marvis AI Assistant provides seamless end-to-end visibility of anomalies across the entire enterprise network, from users in campus and branch networks to applications running in the data center. That comprehensive view has fundamentally changed how we understand service delivery, enabling us to resolve incidents more efficiently and uncover deeper insights into overall network performance. By consolidating visibility across environments, our IT teams can rapidly trace and remediate issues with greater precision. Such clarity is essential for proactively managing performance, optimizing troubleshooting workflows, and delivering a consistent, reliable experience across the organization.
The rapid transformation of Juniper IT’s data center networking is a testament to the power of embracing innovative, AI-native solutions. By leveraging our own technologies like Data Center Director and Data Center Assurance, we’ve tackled challenges around capacity, efficiency, and visibility—while laying the groundwork for a more agile, proactive, and resilient IT organization. This journey underscores the importance of strategic investment in intelligent infrastructure and the profound impact it can have on a technology company’s ability to thrive in the digital age. We’re excited about the future and the continued evolution of our own AI-native network.
Join us at our AI-Native NOW: San Diego event to learn more.
