SOFTWARE LICENSING

Juniper Networks to Help Providers Transition from Traditional Network Infrastructures to Software-Defined Networks

By Nathesh, TMCnet Contributor

At its Global Partner Conference, Juniper Networks (News - Alert), a network solutions provider, revealed its plan to help service providers to seamlessly migrate from traditional network infrastructures to software-defined networks (SDN).

Juniper’s strategy includes efforts to separate software into four layers, management, services, control and forwarding, so an architectural underpinning is realized and each network layer is optimized. Aspects of management, services and control software are to be centralized for simplifying network designs and bringing operating costs down. The cloud option should be considered for elastic scale and flexible deployment and newer business solutions can be obtained by formulating a platform for network applications, services and integration into management systems.

The company’s strategy also calls for plans to standardize protocols for interoperable, heterogeneous support across vendors, providing choice and lowering cost and broadly applying SDN principles to all networking and network services.

Juniper also unveiled Juniper Software Advantage, a transformational new software licensing and maintenance model that enables customers to exploit software value over time.

The Junos Space applications are designed to centralize network management and the Juniper Software Advantage can be deployed for extracting networking and security services from the underlying hardware by creating service virtual machines (VMs). The JunosV App Engine will soon be tweaked to offer SDN Service Chaining functionality and the engine can bring down time, cost and risk for customers to design, test and deliver new network and security services.

Vernon Turner, senior vice president of research at IDC (News - Alert), said in a statement, “SDN is frequently discussed in narrow terms rather than holistically, with solutions focused mostly in the forwarding and data planes. Juniper's approach is one of the most comprehensive that we've seen to date from any networking provider – from both a technology and business model perspective.”

Pradeep Sindhu, co-founder and chief technical officer at Juniper Networks, added, “SDN promises a way for the networking industry to deliver two critically needed benefits to its customers. The first is the ability of vendors to deliver innovation at a faster rate and the ability of customers to absorb it at a faster rate. The second is a dramatic reduction in the operational cost of running a network, achieved primarily through simplification. Juniper pioneered the first step in the separation of control and forwarding functions in networking equipment. This is the next logical step in the evolution of networking technology.”

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