Juniper’s routing leadership goes all the way back to the birth of the company. In 1996, Juniper was founded to build a packet-based router custom built for internet service providers (ISPs) who needed to efficiently direct internet traffic at scale.
Similarly, Mist was originally founded with the goal of bringing AI-driven insights and automation to networking. With over nine years of data science evolution (which has expanded to include many networking domains after the acquisition of Mist in 2019), I feel that Juniper has become a clear leader in the wired and wireless LAN space due to its AIOps, too.
To quote REESE’S (and I hope I’m not dating myself too much here), these are “two great tastes that taste great together.”
Today, it is with great pride that we’re announcing that this integration has indeed happened. Juniper MX and ACX edge routers have now been brought under the premier Mist AI™ engine and microservice cloud. Distributed enterprises can now easily adopt Juniper’s proven and sustainable routers with all the assurance and cost savings that come with AIOps.
Challenges in the WAN edge
In today’s digital landscape, enterprises face a multitude of challenges as they strive to stay ahead of the curve in an increasingly competitive environment. Organizations that see their WAN as a critical element of their success are looking to modernize it. They need their WAN edge to deliver:
- Ease of edge device onboarding
- Prioritization of business-critical applications
- Guaranteed end user performance
- Agility to handle continuously evolving business requirements and changing traffic patterns
- Support for workload repatriation from public to private clouds
- Reliable interconnect that has the capacity to support high traffic volumes, including new AI workloads
- Simplified operation with faster mean time to repair (MTTR)
Since legacy routing infrastructures are tricky to update, enterprises often delay important WAN changes and upgrades. When changes are made, all too often basic configuration errors are made due to avoidable human errors. All of this creates unnecessary risks, which can cost companies real money in the event the WAN is down, underperforming, or not secure.
In the telecom industry, 86% of company executives name finding skilled IT workers as their top challenge[1]. When it comes to edge routing, some of the above issues can be especially problematic given the typical lack of IT resources. The resources that are available cannot be in every branch location, which is why automated and remote operations are critical for distributed enterprises. This is why we created the new Juniper Mist™ Routing Assurance product and brought our Edge MX and ACX Series routers under the Marvis® VNA umbrella.
A bold expansion of our AI-Native Networking Platform
As a cloud-delivered service, Juniper’s new routing assurance product simplifies operations and delivers the most effective way to monitor, analyze, and resolve issues swiftly across multiple branch offices, WAN edge, and peering locations. The extension to Marvis VNA for routing empowers WAN operation with faster documentation search, enabling network operators to query network configurations and ask detailed product questions.
More specifically, our edge routing portfolio delivers the following capabilities:
- Easy onboarding of MX304, MX204, and ACX7024 devices
- Router insights within the Mist dashboard, such as BGP, Class of Services, and Queueing
- Key events with suggested proactive actions
- AI-Native service level expectations (SLEs) that monitor device health
This, in turn, delivers the following key benefits to Juniper customers and partners as part of our ongoing AI-Native evolution:
- Proactively detect and remediate routing issues before they impact users
- Simplify and automate operations, boosting productivity
- Reduce MTTR with root cause analysis and actionable insights
- One AI- and cloud-native platform for all WAN edge uses cases (SD-WAN, SASE, and edge routing) minimizes OpEx and simplifies operations for all WAN environments in a distributed enterprise
- The same Mist AI and cloud platform is also used for wired and wireless access, delivering the industry’s only AI-Native Networking Platform for assured end-to-end campus and branch experiences
In addition, Juniper’s edge routing solution is a key enabler for meeting our customers’ sustainability efforts. Juniper’s routers offer up to 77% lower power consumption and 64% more space efficiency than the competition[1], and have a prolonged lifespan (up to 12 years) that minimizes electronic waste. Mist AI is also proven to eliminate up to 85% of truck rolls in some instances for network troubleshooting in remote locations, which takes vehicles off the streets—and every little bit helps!
In other words, Mist AI and Juniper routing go together like chocolate and peanut butter.
Want to learn more? Read ESG’s AI-Native Requirement white paper, download the Juniper AI-Native Enterprise Routing solution brief, watch our launch video or a short demo.
You might also be interested into our on-demand WAN modernization webinar, delivered in cooperation with IDC.
[1] ACG Research; the TCO and Environmental Benefits of the Juniper Networks Cloud Metro Solutions
