The plan will build on the company’s existing Affirmed Networks/Netronome, Juniper Contrail Provider Cloud and Juniper Networks programmable photonic layer announcements that allow service providers to easily build and manage distributed clouds for new 5G and IoT services. And the new metro fabric will provide an adaptive, agile and secure network infrastructure for simplified service creation and delivery in the metro.
Commenting on the news, Sally Bament, vice president of service provider marketing at Juniper Networks, said: “In our commitment to engineer simplicity into all layers of the network, we are excited to deliver these new capabilities focused on transforming how service providers modernise service delivery in the metro. By combining adaptive and predictive software with new and existing network infrastructure offerings, we are evolving our solutions to enable service providers to deploy a metro network capable of faster service creation and time-to-revenue for a new generation of services and applications, including emerging 5G and IoT services.”
The variety of services and the number of connected devices supported across metro has grown exponentially. According to the company Ethernet business services, applications like Netflix and Skype, infrastructure-as-a-service offerings like Amazon Web Services and various IoT devices have expanded and this will only continue with emerging 5G rollouts. As a result legacy products, manual processes and divergent architectures and protocols have slowed true innovation and made it difficult for service providers to keep up with bandwidth demands and cost constraints.
“It’s not just the sheer amount of traffic going through the metro network that’s become a real challenge – it’s also the type of traffic we’re starting to see in the metro. Creating new services and keeping up with bandwidth needs requires a new approach to metro networks as the status quo is simply unsustainable. Simplicity is the key to our success so we are excited to see Juniper – with whom we’ve partnered for years – proactively reshaping how the metro serves the evolving needs of our customers,” added Marco Arioli, manager of network engineering at Fastweb.
Juniper’s metro fabric, comprises of a disaggregated programmable photonic layer as well as refreshed Juniper Networks ACX series universal metro routers and PTX series packet transport routers. The solution will infuse automation, versatility, security and IP and open packet-optical networking into the metro for new levels of operational simplicity. Service providers building metro services for mobile, business, cable, fibre residential and direct public cloud use cases, can now use a modern service creation platform to deliver new revenue-generating services.
So far Juniper has introduced the first stages of the refreshed metro which includes: two new ACX series routers, as well as a new PTX series packet transport router.
Earlier this month Juniper Networks was named as one of the technology suppliers for Etisalat’s cloud telecom infrastructure platform to host emerging technologies and services. Juniper will offer up its software defined networking (SDN) controller from Juniper-Contrail to the development project.