Intent-based networking pioneer Apstra’s latest product release, Apstra AOS 3.2, adds an operating system capability called Intent Time Voyager. This new feature allows network administrators to essentially time travel — or restore the network to a previous configuration.

Intent Time Voyager works like this: Apstra AOS creates a snapshot of the entire network configuration for every committed change. Network administrators can store up to five snapshots of known-good configurations. This allows them to restore the network to an earlier snapshot with three clicks.

Apstra co-founder and CEO Mansour Karam says this capability is unique for three reasons. First, it’s intent based — it’s not a configuration rollback. Second, AOS pushes the configuration to potentially hundreds of devices. “It’s for the entire network under AOS control, not device by device,” he said.

And finally, because Apstra’s software is vendor agnostic, it translates the changes to the individual devices from vendors including Cisco, Arista Networks, Juniper, and Cumulus, as well as white-box networking products and open source alternatives like SONiC.

This capability can reduce mean time to repair from network outages, Karam said. “It’s a very powerful time voyager kind of ability,” he added.

Some of the other new product features include inter- and intra-data center scale out. This allows customers to add more racks to their data centers, or even add more data centers, to support increased demand or implement disaster recovery strategies. AOS does this by automating data center interconnect (DCI) at the intent level using the EVPN VXLAN standard.

“Customers can manage as one entity multiple data centers that are interconnected with DCI,” Karam said. “That helps them with use cases like migration, or disaster recovery where they would like to have two sites, or just simply scaling out so they can have more resources.”

Apstra also extended enterprise support for SONiC. Microsoft originally developed the open source Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) along with Arista, Broadcom, Dell, and Mellanox, before contributing it to Open Compute Project in 2016. Apstra now supports SONiC in leaf, spine, or superspine data center network architectures.

While SONiC remains more popular among service providers and hyperscale clouds, more enterprises are also deploying the open source network operating system, Karam said. “We are seeing an uptick in community activity with hundreds of developers being deployed on SONiC — essentially taking the SONiC project to the next level in terms of functionality and enterprise-class support — and we’ve certainly taken notice,” he said. “And when SONiC is managed by Apstra, you get the whole benefit of the intent-based approach. You are no longer worried about the specifics of that operating system, and customers can essentially deploy SONiC with very little learning curve.”

And finally, AOS 3.2 includes new service-oriented dashboards, which the vendor says gives network operators faster insights into the health of their network fabrics. It allows them to create their own dashboards and widgets to get information including device health, EVPN validations, throughput health, traffic trends, and virtual infrastructure redundancy checks.