For most businesses, strategizing for 2023 began well before the ball dropped for the New Year. This period of assessment always includes a thorough review of company budget, and identifying sensible investments for the year ahead. Whether you lead a medium-sized business or proudly serve a Fortune 500 enterprise, the number one goal is maximizing profit while minimizing costs.
To build a lasting house, you must first build a strong foundation. Without a strong foundation, you cannot build whatever you desire on it. The same principle can be applied to a data center. A data center requires a well-designed and stable infrastructure that offers the required agility to accommodate dynamically changing technology environments. Ultimately, this ensures greater longevity.
This summer and fall, our team has written a great deal on how Juniper Networks' intent-based networking (IBN) technology is helping companies automate the configuration, deployment, and management of enterprise data center components. We’ve identified how IBN validates the operational state of the network to ensure that it matches its slated intentions. That’s important because in the end, your technology investments are only effective if they further the business objectives of the organization. IBN prevents your technology directives from going adrift.
But what about security? Security must always be part of any discussion involving new technology solutions due to the prevalence of cyberattacks that originate from an ever-expanding threat landscape. The increasing risk factors that companies face today are forcing them to adapt zero-trust security strategies to reduce their threat exposure. Juniper Apstra not only complies with a zero-trust security mandate, but it also helps enforce it.
In the last few years, technology has continued to surge ahead, with many of these new developments taking cybersecurity to new heights. Unfortunately, the same technologies are being used by a growing number of hackers intent on monetizing your personal and professional data. This comes in the form of targeting both traditional and non-traditional devices such as edge devices and virtual cities.
Enterprise technology vendors bombard IT leaders everywhere with messaging that emphasizes the value or added value that their solutions provide. However, value is an open-ended term, and as a consequence, eventually loses its effectiveness.
On the other hand, measured value is a whole other matter. The ability to assign a quantitative value to a respective solution allows for more informed decision making. That’s why Juniper Networks commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to examine the potential return on investment (ROI) that an organization might realize from a Juniper Apstra deployment.
Modernized data centers require a great deal of investment and planning to be implemented and deployed correctly. As an IT leader, you must deploy the data center properly from the outset and ensure that it operates the way it was intended across its entire lifecycle. Otherwise, your enterprise will never realize its full potential and miss out on valuable ROI. While there are many challenges in building, operating, and supporting a data center today, we have identified five highly preventable pain points that companies find themselves struggling with today. The good news is that today’s intent-based networking (IBN) solutions such as Juniper Apstra can permanently relieve these common pain points.
Enterprises modernizing their IT infrastructure to keep up with the demand of a changing workforce need more from their storage providers. With the work-from-anywhere model here to stay, an enterprise storage solution that offers on-demand, always-on, and easy-to-use services is a must.
Ethernet VPN-Virtual Extensible LAN (EVPN-VXLAN) is a network virtualization technology that supports large enterprise and multi-tenant environments. While single-vendor, chassis-based technologies may suffice for most traditional campus network architectures, they are not agile enough to support the scalability and expanding needs of today’s modern enterprises. EVPN-VXLAN/IP enables businesses to virtually connect geographically dispersed locations using Layer 2 (L2) bridging. It is ideal for data center interconnections, large campus environments, cloud-ready networks, and environments required to support substantially large numbers of endpoint devices.
The common idiom, “Be as easy as one-two-three” is well embedded into our culture. It denotes that something is easy, simple, or intuitive enough to the point that it doesn’t require a serious amount of skill or effort. In turn, having the capability to break complex projects into shorter, more digestible three-step processes is something that modern professionals desire.
Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your next data center. There’s a great deal of complexity and moving parts to consider along with many potential pain points that cause delays. That’s why the design phase is so critical. Whether you are constructing a data center or erecting a building, you need a blueprint to guide your crew throughout the process. A data center blueprint is more than just drawing equipment racks with mounted devices. It needs to include granular details such as IP address pools, VLAN IDs, routing protocols, and security policies – all of which must be pushed out in the form of configuration settings for all interconnected devices.
