At its Global Partner Conference on Tuesday, Juniper Networks unveiled its vision to transition enterprises and service providers from traditional network  infrastructures to software -defined networks (SDN ). With its strategy, the networking company has thrown down the SDN gauntlet.
Bob Muglia, executive vice president of the Software Solutions Division at Juniper, called SDN a major shift in the networking industry. He said the impact of SDN would be much broader than others have suggested.
"It will redefine networking and create new winners and losers," Muglia said. "We're embracing SDN with clearly defined principles, a four-step roadmap to help customers adopt SDN within their business, and the networking industry's first comprehensive software-centric business model."
Juniper Nails the Needs
Juniper's SDN strategy is rooted in principles the company believes directly address the most pressing networking challenges facing the industry. First, Juniper sees the need to cleanly separate networking software into four layers -- management , services, control and forwarding -- providing the architectural underpinning to optimize each plane within the network.
Juniper also pointed to a need to centralize the appropriate aspects of the management, services and control software to simplify network design and lower operating costs; use the cloud for elastic scale and flexible deployment, enabling usage-based pricing to reduce time-to-service and correlate cost based on value.
Juniper said the industry needs to create a platform for network applications, services and integration into management systems, enabling new business solutions; standardize protocols for interoperable, heterogeneous support across vendors, providing choice and lowering cost; and broadly apply SDN principles to all networking and network services, including security from the data center and enterprise campus to the mobile and wireline networks used by service providers.
"SDN promises a way for the networking industry to deliver two critically needed benefits to its customers," said Pradeep Sindhu, co-founder and chief technical officer at Juniper Networks. (continued...)
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