Juniper Networks today announced a bevy of updates to its Contrail SDN solution, including container support, bare metal service VMware vCenter Integration, and enhanced service chaining. The company also unveiled a new compact, containerized virtual firewall, the cSR, which is SDN-controlled and supports microservices, and a superfast (100Gbps) virtual firewall called the vSRX, which it says offers speed that is 10 times that of the nearest competitor.
The container support allows users to create virtual networks using Docker containers, and to support container cluster management systems like Kubernetes so users can segment pods for microservices. The support for bare metal VMware allows users to interconnect their new and legacy environments. And the service chaining allows for the combination of physical and virtual network functions, the ability to add IPv6 to services in a service chain, and more.
Scott Miles, Juniper’s senior director of cloud and enterprise portfolio marketing, told NFVZone that because the company’s new firewall can boot so fast and is designed for a large number of scale-out sessions it can actually work in new container environments. That’s important, he added, given that containers are isolated but not inherently secure.
“We believe that security is the killer app that will accelerate SDN adoption,” said Mike Spanbauer, vice president of security, test, and advisory at NSS Labs. “The complement of SDN and security can solve one of the greatest problems enterprises have dealt with over the last 25 years of enterprise network expansion, an operationally efficient way to implement policy, detection and enforcement across the entire network. With its Software-Defined Secure Networks vision, Juniper is making a move in that direction.”
AT&T is among the network operators leveraging Juniper Contrail for its NFV deployment, Miles noted. Juniper’s technology will enable AT&T to do service chaining and orchestration and deliver virtualized firewalls, load balancers and other virtualized functions to customers so they can provision their own services, he said. As INTERNET TELEPHONY reported in October, AT&T offers a Network on Demand service powered by technology from Brocade, Cisco, and Juniper.
Symantec and a handful of other network operators are also leveraging Contrail solutions today to power commercially available services, Miles said.
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
