Juniper Networks unveiled its Contrail Enterprise Multicloud, which was designed to enable end-to-end control across underlying devices in data center infrastructures as well as policy control overlay from a single command center.
Contrail Enterprise Multicloud is a software package that helps enterprise data centers manage workloads across multi-vendor environments through orchestration and analytics. The new offering allows Juniper to position itself as a more open alternative to Cisco's ACI and VMware's NSX.
"Cisco has the depth of capability, but they are decidedly Cisco-focused," said Michael Bushong, Juniper's vice president of enterprise cloud marketing in an email to FierceTelecom. "In fact, it’s difficult for incumbent players to drive multi-vendor solutions as it weakens their incumbent position while promoting competitors. NSX is really an overlay management and microsegmentation solution. It does not do any of the underlay management."
In addition to working with multiple vendors, Contrail Enterprise Multicloud also enables policy and control capabilities across private, public and hybrid cloud deployments. Juniper said it leveraged open interfaces and standard protocols to support the multi-vendor environments.
Bushong said that Contrail Enterprise Multicloud supported open standard interfaces for configuration control and management (NETCONF/RPC), using Ansible playbooks; (REST/HTTPS APIs; XMPP), routing (BGP, BGP IP-VPN, and BGP EVPN for routing control); forwarding (VXLAN with EVPN control plane, MPLSoUDP, MPLSoGRE, plain IP, IP over IPsec); and analytics (JTI, OpenConfig, SNMP, sFlow, J-Flow, and gRPC) for system logging.
Contrail Enterprise Multicloud also includes a single tool to manage bare metal servers, virtual machines (VMs), containers, and network devices.
Bushsong said that Contrail Enterprise Multicloud with fabric management capabilities, along with a unified dashboard called Contrail Command, would be available in the second quarter of this year.
Near the end of last year Juniper put its OpenContrail software-defined networking (SDN) controller under the auspices of the Linux Foundation Networking Fund, where it was as renamed Tungsten Fabric.
Bushong said enhancements for Contrail Enterprise Multicloud to manage public clouds as a fabric connecting workloads across private and public clouds would be available in the third quarter of this year.