Juniper will be at Interop Las Vegas from May 7 to May 9 at booth 1751. We have a lot going on and hope that you will come by to see our new products and meet our team. We will be featuring 8 demo areas in the booth that will include a look at the new EX9200 programmable core switch and the JunosV Contrail overlay network technology. There will be a presentation theater that will feature 4 presentations on topics including SDN and the virtual data center. We will also have meeting rooms so that you can discuss your network requirements with our executives and technology specialists.

Lab Madness, a competition for the best lab setup, took off on our social channels a few weeks ago, bringing together fantastic selection network setups that the community could vote on. See this blog for details, Juniper Lab Madness. I checked-in with this year’s Lab Champion, Ezekiel Castro, whose setup, The Playground, took the title win. At twenty years old, Ezekiel is working to pioneer the adoption of Juniper Networks’ equipment in the Philippines. Find out what he has to say about why he participated and why he like to work with Juniper equipment in this interview.

Is it hard to move to Juniper and Junos and is it worth the effort? It’s a question that we hear often. Many people have been trained on one vendors equipment and OS and used it for years. Then the time comes to upgrade those old switches or routers or maybe add to the WLAN or security infrastructure. It’s the opportunity to try something new. Maybe you’ve been thinking of making the move to Juniper, but you've been wondering how hard it is and if it is worth the effort. I’ve gathered comments and observations that I’d like to share.

The data center infrastructure is evolving. Application architectures have become more distributed; compute has gone from dedicated hosts to hypervisors, and storage has become converged and shared.  The challenge facing organizations is that they need to evolve the network to better serve the business. The network must evolve and become simpler and flatter, more automated, more open and more integrated with the rest of the environment. A simple and flat network delivers the performance, management and orchestration aspects necessary for businesses to stay agile. Let’s take a look at how we make this happen.

With the exponential growth in the numbers of servers in Enterprise Data Center and the corresponding complexity and confusion that can follow the need for management automation of server resources is well understood by the IT staff. However for every server there are one or more network connections that need to be configured and managed and until recently this was still a manual process.  Juniper Networks has addressed this challenge with the release of Puppet for Junos OS.

Designing a large campus network can be a daunting task. It is certainly a complex undertaking. It can be especially difficult if you have to configure equipment that you haven’t worked with before. You might find yourself wishing that someone would write a how to guide. At Juniper Network we hear you and that’s why we’ve published another one of our Implementation guides. This one is for the Vertical Campus. It will show you the way to set up Juniper LAN, WLAN, and security devices and help you get up and running in a shorter time, with a tested and proven design.

Server virtualization has increasing become implemented in the data center because it enables higher utilization of physical servers increasing their value to the organization. By abstracting the server operating system from the server hardware, virtualization allows physical resources to be shared among many virtual machines.

The data center is a concentrated deployment environment for networking equipment, consisting of thousands of servers that are accessed by tens of thousands of client systems. The need for large-scale access creates a complex set of data flows to business applications that must be protected. Determining firewall deployment configurations and sizing in a data center is a considerable effort and firewall performance is critical to handle the volume of connections per second, and sustained connections. To address these challenges, Juniper Networks created a new class of security products, the SRX Series Services Gateways, to provide the ability to scale in the data center

As Service Providers are faced with increased competition from Over the Top Providers they are seeking new markets to enter. However, as they look to create and launch new services they must grapple with the growing number and complexity of hardware devices in their networks. This creates challenges due to the time it takes to certify equipment and with staffing and training of skilled operators for many devices. It also creates cost pressure with the need for more space and power at a time when these resources are becoming ever more expensive. Making upfront capital outlays for equipment in anticipation of revenue that ramps up over time can stress budgets. As a result Service Providers are looking to change how network services are deployed and some are finding Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) as the answer to their problems.

Service provider networks are continually growing and evolving in order to provide a rich end user experience. Ethernet-based services are increasing rapidly to deliver high bandwidth and anytime access to video, voice, and broadband applications. In order to meet the needs of their customers, service providers have built complex networks consisting of thousand of high capacity Ethernet ports on devices in many locations. .

With the rapid growth in the adoption of server virtualization new requirements for securing the data center have emerged. Today’s data center contains a combination of physical servers and virtual servers. With the advent of distributed applications traffic often travels between virtual servers and might not be seen by physical security devices.

One of the most interesting stories to come out of the presidential election was the use of big data analytics to help campaign workers to bring out the vote. Both candidates used the technology. Project Narwhal was the Obama team’s effort. It was used to connect previously separate databases so that information on potential voters was accessible to campaign workers. They used the information to target voters with specific issues before the election and during the election they used it to determine who had not yet voted and do last minute outreach.

Every company that does business over the web, WAN, or through a data center must have a  plan to protect connectivity and assets in case any data center components fail. The key is having a good business continuity and disaster recovery solution in place. Over the last few months I’ve been working on a solution for architecting the network for disaster avoidance and recovery. I delivered a webinar about this just days before Hurricane Sandy landed on the East Coast. It’s not often that a topic is so relevant. As I watched the news a couple of days later it was shocking to see what happened to people’s neighborhoods. My first reaction was to hope that rescue efforts were underway and that people would be safe. As a few days went by I was wondering about how people were doing with geting their businesses up and running again. I wrote the need for good disaster planning in a blog in early September, see link.

The OpenStack Summit in San Diego was the place to be last week. I attended and wanted to share my observations. There was a lot of participation and energy. It was sold out with over 1300 people attending and about 35 vendors displaying their products.  Previous summits were developer forums. This time the format was expanded and there were hundreds of sessions in many categories including case studies, industry analysis as well as the usual develop sessions.

We have all noticed that the business environment is changing at a rapid pace. IT departments, previously seen as cost centers, were tasked with reducing their infrastructure and even justifying their existence, but not anymore. With the rise of just-in-time manufacturing, and long tail customization, all driven by ecommerce that’s increasingly accessed from mobile devices, the old rules are being turned upside down.  The IT organization is now tasked with enabling the business to drive innovation.