Tier 1 service providers, including AT&T, are already using Juniper Networks’ Contrail Networking in their telco clouds. Based on its experience with these operators, the vendor is now offering a turn key telco cloud system based on its Contrail software-defined networking (SDN) and built on Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution.
“We realized that what service providers need is a turn key solution that takes best-of-breed products and takes an easy path to build a telco cloud,” said Pratik Roychowdhury, senior director of product management for Contrail at Juniper.
He said telco clouds span multiple data center environments, from the core of networks to the edge. For those service providers that don’t want to reinvent the wheel, Juniper has put together a turn key Contrail Cloud offering that uses Contrail Networking, Red Hat OpenStack, Red Hat Ceph Storage, monitoring from AppFormix, and pre-validated virtual network functions (VNFs) from Juniper as well as third parties.
Roychowdhury explained that two of Contrail’s product lines are Contrail Networking and Contrail Cloud.
Contrail Networking can integrate with different OpenStack distributions from various vendors. It can even integrate with OpenStack environments that customers have built themselves. “We integrate in those instances with Neutron,” he said.
Previously, Contrail Cloud was based on Ubuntu OpenStack. But now, Juniper has turned Contrail Cloud into this turn key offering and migrated it to the Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
Juniper also integrated its AppFormix into Contrail Cloud to take care of network monitoring and service assurance for network functions virtualization (NFV) workloads. Juniper acquired AppFormix about a year ago. “Contrail Networking already works with AppFormix,” said Roychowdhury. “We now provide this for Contrail Cloud as well.”
As far as pre-validated VNFs within Contrail Cloud, Juniper is first offering its own vSRX virtual firewall and also Affirmed Networks’ virtual evolved packet core (vEPC). “A lot of service providers are offering mobility services, and they want to virtualize their packet core,” said Roychowdhury. “Over time, we will offer a lot more use cases.”
Finally, Juniper is providing professional services for its Contrail Cloud, including offering to build and operate the cloud infrastructure for customers and providing 24/7 support.
