Juniper has taken the wraps off a cloud-based SD-WAN service it says will ease the management and bolster the security of wired and wireless-connected branch office networks.
The Contrail SD-WAN cloud offering expands on the company’s existing on-premise (SRX-based) and virtual (NFX-based) SD-WAN offerings to include greater expansion possibilities – up to 10,000 spoke-attached sites and support for more variants of passive redundant hybrid WAN links – and topologies such as hub and spoke, partial, and dynamic full mesh, Juniper stated.
The service brings with it Juniper’s Contrail Service Orchestration package, which secures, automates, and runs the service life cycle across NFX Series Network Services Platforms, EX Series Ethernet Switches, SRX Series next-generation firewalls, and MX Series 5G Universal Routing Platforms. Ultimately it lets customers manage and set up SD-WANs all from a single portal.
The package is also a service orchestrator for the vSRX Virtual Firewall and vMX Virtual Router, available in public cloud marketplaces such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, Juniper said. The SD-WAN offering also includes integration with cloud security provider ZScaler.
Contrail Service Orchestration offers organizations visibility across SD-WAN, as well as branch wired and now wireless infrastructure. Monitoring and intelligent analytics offer real-time insight into network operations, allowing administrators to preempt looming threats and degradations, as well as pinpoint issues for faster recovery.
The new service also includes support for Juniper’s recently acquired Mist Systems wireless technology, which lets the service access and manage Mist’s wireless access points, allowing customers to meld wireless and wired networks.
Juniper recently closed the agreement to buy innovative wireless-gear-maker Mist for $405 million. Mist touts itself as having developed an artificial-intelligence-based wireless platform that makes Wi-Fi more predictable, reliable, and measurable.
