Juniper Apstra Data Center Director

Key Advantages

• Strategic Insights

  Collect and analyze all relevant data points with complete telemetry, advanced analytics, and the Flow Insights solution of Data Center Director.

• Speed

  Reduce time-to-market for services from weeks to hours by creating a complete software data center that is ready to operate as soon as switching hardware is deployed. Automate Day 2 configuration tasks for service provisioning times up to 20 times faster.

• Reliability

  Automatically generate correct configurations for each vendor based on your defined intent, perform pre-validation of every change, and continuously check network health. Data Center Director minimizes the chances of human error and improves network and application availability.

Transform Private Data Center Operations

The current business environment demands that organizations adopt innovative business models and quickly offer new services to remain competitive. This requires network teams to design, implement, and manage data center networks rapidly while ensuring high reliability. However, this task is increasingly complicated by distributed data, rapid application changes, a shortage of skilled experts, and complex data center networks.

Apstra Data Center Director helps service providers and enterprises manage their private data centers with the same simplicity as cloud infrastructure. With its complete lifecycle management and automation functions, customers can manage and configure their data centers more easily. Advanced analytics, telemetry, and flow data from Data Center Director provide total network and application visibility, forming the foundation for Juniper Data Center Assurance's AIOps capabilities. Furthermore, as the solution integrates seamlessly with other cloud management services and tools like Terraform and Ansible, data center operations teams can use their preferred technologies. This, along with Juniper's validated designs and templates, ensures that customers' data center network operations are reliable and consistent. Data Center Director's unique combination of features translates to efficiency, scalability, strategic insights, speed, and reliability for private data centers from a single control point.

Achieve Business Results Faster

Figure 1: Advantages seen across the entire network lifecycle.

Complete Lifecycle Management, from Day 0 Design to Day 2 Operations

Design, implement, and operate your data center network with a single management tool, regardless of the hardware vendor. The network, whether single or multi-vendor, is continuously validated against the desired outcome. This is achieved using a single source of truth, ensuring data consistency and reducing the risk of different teams working with disparate and incongruent information. Data Center Director allows operators to design the network and specify the desired business outcomes (intent), and advanced automation instantly configures network operations, ensuring they align with the intended design.

Following a proactive model, Data Center Director alerts on any potential power failure or deviation and automatically corrects these issues, optimizing the process with intent-based network technology that translates specified objectives into automated actions. Data Center Director simplifies Day 2 operations with pre-change analysis, continuous validation, incident and change management, audit control, and compliance assurance, plus maintenance mode functions to shorten the periods during which these tasks are performed. The Time Voyager feature stores configuration history so that if any change (a new configuration, software upgrade, etc.) causes unexpected problems, it is possible to revert to a previous network state in one go, even in a multi-vendor environment.

Ensure Operations are Reliable and Consistent

Data Center Director's strategic plans are repeatable and continuously validated, ensuring that the configurations you define are always applied correctly the first time. When changes are needed, customers simply specify the desired business outcomes using a declarative model. The platform handles configuration management and optimizes the data center network with unparalleled efficiency and precision. All of this, combined with Data Center Director's high scalability, allows for the rapid and reliable configuration of new services to instill confidence in a network that maintains its consistency, security, and resilience across core and edge locations.

Avoid Vendor Lock-in and Work with Multiple Vendors

Multi-vendor support offers significant strategic flexibility to customers. Apstra supports the widest range of hardware and software vendors in the industry, including solutions based on open standards. This means your business is free to choose the hardware and software that best suits your strategy. Apstra provides an abstraction layer based on logical designs from different vendors, so network teams don't have to waste time learning different automation tools; instead, they can focus on innovating to drive greater business success.

Network Visibility to Improve Performance

Data Center Director offers advanced analytics, telemetry, and flow data to provide detailed visibility into the entire network. With flow data, you gain complete network visibility across different vendors, enabling detailed analysis of traffic patterns, performance optimization, security enhancement, compliance assurance, capacity planning, and cost control.

Flexibility for Any Network Topology and Design

While Data Center Director provides operators with an optimized experience, robust safeguards, and powerful automation capabilities, some organizations have particular deployment requirements that demand more flexibility and choice regarding certain protocols, functions, and architectures. The Apstra Data Center Director Freeform reference design offers this flexibility and choice. With Freeform, automation specialists and DevOps experts can have more control over their chosen network design.

Take the First Step Towards Automation

Data Center Director's intent-based networking automation offers the reliability, simplicity, and scalability needed to deliver an enhanced network experience. To learn more about Apstra Data Center Director, visit https://www.juniper.net/us/en/products/network-automation/apstra-data-center-director.html.

About Juniper Networks

At Juniper Networks, we believe connectivity is important, but extraordinary connections are essential. Juniper's AI-native networking platform, Mist™, was designed from the ground up to leverage AI to deliver exceptional user experiences that are secure and sustainable from the edge to the data center and across the cloud. Learn more at juniper.net or connect with Juniper on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Facebook.