Juniper SD-WAN Update Furthers Multicloud Vision

By updating its SD-WAN offering, Juniper Networks said it has taken another incremental step to help organizations reach multicloud nirvana: managing disparate networks as one cohesive set of resources. This goal of unifying datacenter, campus and branch networks with public clouds into one enterprise-wide fabric involves distinct paths for each resource, and the recent update to Juniper's SD-WAN solution signifies another step forward, the company said. Using software-defined networking (SDN) technology and approaches, SD-WANs are a growing part of the next-gen networking and virtualization space, simplifying WAN management and operations by decoupling the networking hardware from its control mechanism. Juniper's Contrail SD-WAN update is part of an expansion of its campus portfolio, announced yesterday, that includes broadening the reach of its EVPN-VXLAN fabric to campus networks. This, the company said, will enable a common architecture through the combination of campus and datacenter architectures. The EVPN-VXLAN protocol provides layer-3 transport with layer-2 capabilities that allow organizations to evolve while also taking into consideration legacy applications, the company said, making it ideal for campus architectures. "Through this unification, Juniper Networks is providing the building blocks for an enterprise-wide fabric, a key component in building a simple, secure and automated multicloud," the company said. The update follows on last month's announcement that the company turned over its open source SDN Open Contrail project to The Linux Foundation and unveiled an expanded commercial enterprise offering based on the software, called Contrail Enterprise Multicloud.