Juniper aims to grow telco business with enhanced Contrail Cloud Platform
Juniper is announcing updates to its Contrail Cloud Platform aimed at making it easier for service providers to build and deploy telco coud environments.
The platform offers complete cloud orchestration software that includes distributed compute, storage, networking and management. The updates include enhancements to the OpenStack and distributed storage modules, enhancements to the platform's real-time montoring and service assurances, as well as new professional and managed services.
With the updated platform, Juniper is aiming to grow its business with Tier 1 telcos, as well as gain new business from Tier 2, Tier 3 and cable operators who are all facing the same challenges, Pratik Roychowdhury, Juniper's head of product management for Contrail, told ZDNet.
After working closely with Tier 1 providers, "we realized the big challenges they were facing were on operations and building on the cloud," Roychowdhury said. "Tier 2 and Tier 3 are facing it even more."
Building up a cloud environment with heterogenous components, often from different vendors, can create interoperability, support issues and management issues, Roychowdhury said. Monitoring data from real-time sources can be a costly and complicated process.
To address those challenges, Juniper is first expanding its partnership with Red Hat, migrating Contrail Cloud to Red Hat's OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage, an open, scalable, software-defined storage solution.
Next, Juniper is integrating into Contrail Cloud the automation and optimization functionality of AppFormix, which Juniper acquired in 2016. This integration will provide real-time monitoring and service assurance of network functions virtualization (NFV) workloads. This should drastically simplify cloud operations for service providers, Roychowdhury said.
Juniper is also offering end-to-end professional services for Contrail Cloud customers once their environment is built out. Lastly, the company is offering a number of pre-validated virtual network functions.