I’m thrilled to share recognition for Juniper switches: Forrester has named Juniper Networks as a Leader in its recent report, The Forrester Wave™: Open, Programmable Switches For A Businesswide Software-Defined Network, Q3 2020.
This Forrester report, authored by Andre Kindness, publishes its scoring criteria for an objective viewpoint of the vendors. This detailed independent assessment follows Juniper also being named this month by Gartner as a Leader in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Data Center and Cloud Networking.
Our Juniper team thrives on the successes of our customers, who are the strength behind these recognitions. Whether it’s Aston Martin Lagonda reducing network-related tickets to 3% of service requests or William and Mary saving 400 hours of configuration time with Juniper Automation, we celebrate what our customers achieve.
Business-Led Assessment
The Forrester report helps buyers to consider what matters in their businesswide switching fabrics and to navigate the options in a business-led methodology. The report considers the essential transitions to support digital businesses and modern workloads—from technology to process to people.
Forrester’s key takeaway identifies “a single OS and extensible and programmable switching” as two of the key differentiators for vendors seeking to build a businesswide SDN.
This design guidance is in contrast to the monolithic SDN solutions of many incumbents. These solutions disregard open layering, foundational to good network design since its earliest days, making these solutions exceedingly difficult to evolve or change out, even in future technology generations.
In determining the leaders in switches for SDN, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of 12 vendors, including how they address Forrester’s five tenets of Virtual Network Infrastructure [VNI]. The research provides a written report along with a time-saving, decision criteria workbook with suggested weighting and prefilled vendor assessment.
Juniper as a Leader in Open, Programmable Switches for SDN
The report recognizes Juniper for its “comprehensive, businesswide networking platform.”. Our multivendor data center solutions apply to a wide set of use cases and offer expert help in migration. From the report:
“Juniper Networks recognizes that customers need more than technology and products and has developed various resources to educate customers on laying out their automation journey, increased the amount of education classes around programming, and led various open standards efforts to create open networking fabrics. Customers that want to automate the entire network with a consistent OS, from the data center to the business edge, should look to Juniper Networks.” – The Forrester Wave™: Open, Programmable Switches For A Businesswide Software-Defined Network, Q3 2020.
In building its solutions, Juniper focuses on providing the best choice for those who need modern fabrics, automation and visibility and security today to simplify operations. Our solution designs provide a migration path to multicloud without lock-in. We have the experts and the tools to help you succeed: the innovators who wrote the standards, the architects and engineers who have guided thousands of large and small deployments and our virtual labs to provide hands-on learning and a robust environment for proof of concept.
Juniper delivers essential capabilities in:
- Fabrics – Supports traditional and cloud-native apps on the same network, while embracing a multi-vendor network. Our solutions leverage mature standards and protocols, such as EVPN-VXLAN, to normalize data center and fabric operations. From multicast to multihoming, Juniper offers the best EVPN-VXLAN network to scale and simplify operations. Juniper fabric management is intent-based and built with the cloud in mind.
- Automation – To be effective, automation must break free of traditional silos to span across network infrastructure elements, teams and operations systems. A set of rich, open and standards-based interfaces, along with workflow-based tools, help network operators across the full operations lifecycle—from network provisioning to management to orchestration.Additionally, Juniper is a founding sponsor of the open-source educational project, NRE Labs, providing short exercises to learn automation tools, skills and processes. Visit nrelabs.io.
- Visibility and Insights – Juniper switches and analytics solutions provide visibility across the underlay and overlay with sub-second granularity and asynchronous push models. The richness and granularity of Junos telemetry prepares our customers to leverage AI and ML tools to transform data-center operations through insights meaningful to operators. Our Healthbot software aggregates the real-time telemetry data of Junos to deliver predictive insights across the network.
- Security – Our products and solutions extend security to all connection points across the network and cloud to safeguards users, applications and infrastructure. By enabling enforcement in existing and virtual devices, the network becomes a distributed security blanket that stops threats at the point of attack and performs rapid and automated threat remediation.
The foundation of Juniper’s leading SDN solutions are our switches. The broad portfolio includes both specialized QFX Series switches for leaf and spine and our versatile QFX 5200 Series as one common platform for both – simplifying data center operations and support. Our switching, routing and security platforms feature Junos everywhere across all devices, delivering richness of features, telemetry and programmability.
Customers Experience the Value
See what Juniper can do for you. Break away from the Spanning Tree. Move beyond the sleepless nights ahead of big network changes. Cut down repetitive work. Escape the stranglehold of big-box vendors with their proprietary software and mind-numbing licensing complexity. Remove the operations silos of your infrastructure and applications teams.
Our Juniper team will be delighted to show you the possibilities. Reach out via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, email, or even your phone!
Gartner Disclaimer:
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Data Center and Cloud Networking, Andrew Lerner, Evan Zeng, Jonathan Forest, 30 June 2020
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
