Just like the latest Fast and Furious movie playing in theaters, there’s often a similar race in the data center as IT operators struggle to keep up with the speed of digital business demands in an environment that requires rapid change and flawless execution. Working at this pace often results in errors, leading to frustrations and unintended destabilization of application services for the business.
To address this challenge, many organizations have embraced the cloud in their data center architectures because of its flexibility, scalability, agility and ease of use. This approach overcomes the perception that traditional on-premises data centers are slow, complex and difficult to maintain day-to-day. Yet, many businesses still need tight control of their application deployment, data governance and long-term budget forecasting.
What Matters Now in the Data Center
To meet expected SLAs and achieve ongoing operational flexibility and cost savings, IT professionals need a data center solution that meets essential operational requirements and:
- Turns on services seamlessly and automatically as needed without creating instability
- Provides assurance and adheres to compliance rules
- Incorporates visibility and analytics to ensure operational efficiencies
Cloudy with a Chance of Insecurity
The public cloud addresses many of these requirements, but concerns persist. A recent blog by A16Z notes that the cost of running applications in the cloud can rapidly grow and consume much of an IT budget. However, proper planning and an understanding of the application’s lifecycle can mitigate cost issues. A bigger issue is whether the cloud is the right platform for particular workloads. For instance, compliance and governance rules often restrict organizations from placing sensitive company data in the cloud because of the potential security risk. An application’s lack of cloud readiness may also preclude it from residing in the cloud.
One option is to run a hybrid environment where some workloads are on-premises and others are in the cloud. This approach offers more choices, allowing organizations to retain control over certain workloads while providing the flexibility to scale up or down as application usage changes. Operators that have proven success in the creation of this hybrid environment have one thing in common. They have architected their on-prem network with the sophistication of being able to scale out as their business grows and yet the simplicity of the cloud.
The Cloud You Own – Cloud Agility and Simplicity On-Prem
Today’s data center isn’t like a legacy data center, which could be a combination of mixed equipment and tools requiring highly specialized operations. For example, in modern designs, any software can be run on any server or set of servers. This is possible with common servers connected uniformly by a high-speed (CLOS) network. Further, the evolution of automation solutions has led to greater simplicity and assurance for on-premises data centers.
Juniper Apstra helps IT teams to deliver these key operational requirements in on-premises environments by providing:
- Fast Service Delivery: Allows automation of service delivery in minutes, not hours or days.
- Intent Assurance: Provisions the network fabric correctly the first and every time based on business intent and continuous validation.
- Simplified Day-2 Operations: Provides comprehensive analytics to troubleshoot and reduce mean-time-to-resolution.
- Multi-Vendor Support: Enables flexible and consistent operations in a wide range of vendor environments.
- Open API: Integrates seamlessly with existing tools, improving operational efficiency and reducing op-ex.
Juniper Apstra eliminates the need to compromise and gives data centers cloud-like capabilities. Instead, organizations get to choose where they run workloads based on their unique economic, compliance and security requirements.
“We are excited to move forward with Juniper Apstra, as its detailed visibility and troubleshooting abilities within our data center will allow us to find root-cause analysis faster than our current solution. We plan to use customized dashboards to bring visibility to other REI business units regarding the health of the data center.” – Don Ely, Lead Network Security Engineer, REI
“We went from POC to production in 2 weeks.” Beelastic
“What used to take several days is now completed in tens of minutes!” – Kakuya Ando, Data Center Network 3, Site Operations Division, System Management Group, Yahoo! Japan
In conclusion, the Juniper Apstra solution provides simplicity, reliability and visibility all in one, enabling organizations to be Fast and not Furious.
To learn more, please visit our Juniper Apstra product page.
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