The announcement was made at Juniper's global partner conference in Las Vegas and billed as "the most comprehensive vision in the industry to transition enterprises and service providers from traditional network infrastructures to software-defined networks (SDN)."
Juniper said that its SDN strategy would "enable companies to accelerate the design and delivery of new services, lower the cost of network operation, and provide a clear path to implementation."
In simple terms SDN splits a network into basic, and hopefully standardised, hardware and embeds most of the functionality in software enabling a network to be fully reconfigured by programming the software through standard interfaces.
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According to Bob Muglia, executive vice president, of Juniper's Software Solutions division who presented on the vision a the conference, "SDN is major shift in the networking and security industries. Its impact will extend far beyond the data centre and is thus actually much broader then many predict today.
"SDN will create new winners and losers. We will see new companies successfully emerge and we'll watch as some incumbents unsuccessfully struggle to transition. But like any major industry trend, the customer benefit is real and we've now reached a tipping point where the technology shift is inevitable."
Juniper's vision for the SDN is for four layers (or planes): management, services, control and forwarding, cleanly separated. It says its strategy is rooted in six principles. However it will not be able to apply these unilaterally as they require cross-industry collaboration and agreement.
For example one principle is to "standardise protocols for interoperable, heterogeneous support across vendors, providing choice and lowering cost." Another is to provide the architectural underpinning to optimise each of these planes within the network.
Juniper is claiming to be the only networking provider with a SDN strategy that addresses the key challenges customers face with networks today and that provides a clear set of steps that can enable customers to start taking advantage of the promise of a SDN-enabled network in 2013 and beyond.
Juniper laid out four steps.
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Step 1: Centralise network management, analytics and configuration functionality to provide a single master that configures all networking devices. This, Juniper said, "lowers operating cost and allows customers to gain business insight from their networks. It claimed that users of applications based on Junos Space could begin taking this step today."
Step 2: Extract networking and security services from the underlying hardware by creating service virtual machines (VMs). Juniper plans to introduce this functionality with the JunosV App Engine, scheduled to be available in Q1 2013. This step is supported by Juniper Software Advantage, Juniper's new software licensing approach, also announced today.
Step 3: Introduce a centralised controller that enables multiple network and security services to connect in series across devices within the network. This is called "SDN Service Chaining" -- using software to virtually insert services into the flow of network traffic.
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Step 4: Optimise the usage of network and security hardware to deliver high performance. Juniper claims that in SDN synergies between network software and security hardware will deliver 10 times or better performance for critical networking functions than can be accomplished in software alone.
Commenting on the announcement in a blog post Tom Nolle, president of consulting firm CIMI Corporation, said: "Juniper's SDN strategy is really a Network Functions Virtualisation strategy...In the Juniper approach, SDN is essentially redefined as targeting the centralisation of network-related functions rather than the adaptive control-plane functions."
According to Nolle: "The real goal of SDN, what I've called 'purist' SDN, is to centralise the control function...Juniper isn't talking about that at all, and in fact they are implying that the control processes remain largely distributed."
He added: "NFV is something operators are serious about, something that creates the framework for the service layer of the future. Juniper is articulating an NFV strategy and that's a first. Their collateral material on JunosV is explicit in the relationship between the concept and NFV goals, and...they have now offered a useful NFV model."
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