Juniper Networks today clamped on to a growing industry-wide effort to rethink how various layers of network infrastructure is assembled and operated. Cloud Metro, the vendor’s vision for the future of metro networks, aims to move past what it describes as siloed, point-to-point metro networks with a versatile IP services fabric.

“Unlike today’s fragmented architectures, a Cloud Metro is built for resource-pooling, network slicing, and automated cloud-based operations,” Brendan Gibbs, Juniper’s VP of automated WAN, explained in a blog post. 

The vendor calls for a Cloud Metro to interface with physical and virtual network functions (VNFs) to better distribute services, user plane functions, and the edge wherever it is needed. Juniper isn’t alone in pushing for a re-architected network infrastructure, but it does appear to be going it alone.

“Juniper takes a solution approach by combining scalable IP fabric, service intelligence, and automation to enable network operators to build the next-generation metro,” Julius Francis, senior director of product marketing at Juniper, wrote in response to questions. “The Juniper solution is also open and multi-vendor to enable network operators to build a multi-vendor environment easily.”

VMware, Dell Technologies, and a group of cloud and edge infrastructure companies formed the Open Grid Alliance earlier this week to foster a re-architected internet. Cisco is also increasingly sharing details about its vision for a flattened internet infrastructure with a routed optical networking portfolio featuring Acacia pluggable optics, Cisco Silicon One, converged SDN transport, edge computing, and network automation.

Juniper, like Cisco, is framing its vision around its own products and services, specifically what it calls “three core pillars.” The first, scalable IP services fabric, is being reinforced with a pair of new Juniper routers — the ACX7100-48L and ACX7100-32C — for high capacity and high-density aggregation that maxes out with 50 Gb/s and 400 Gb/s Ethernet service ports, respectively. 

The other pillars, according to Juniper, include service intelligence that employs cloud principles used in hyperscale data networks, and Paragon Automation, Juniper’s new brand and suite of software developed for vendor-agnostic monitoring of network services, automation, and resiliency testing. 

“Network operators are virtualizing their beach-front properties like base station sites, pre-aggregation sites, and central offices to play a critical role in the emerging edge cloud,” Francis explained. “Network operators know that building the edge cloud environments alone is not sufficient and they need to build a converged metro network to interconnect them with service intelligence and automation. Juniper Cloud Metro focuses squarely on the inter-connection part of building the converged networks to interconnect the distributed edge clouds.”

Metro networks and data centers are traditionally “used as fat pipes that simply moved traffic from the access, across the metro to the service edge and core, then back again,” he said, adding that operators want to end the practice of making duplicate investments for multiple physical and parallel networks, including mobile backhaul and consumer broadband networks.

“In the 5G, IoT, and edge compute era, a growing number of new services increasingly depend on assured service experience that only the network operator can provide by virtue of their evolving network IP service fabric architectures and service assurance capabilities,” Francis explained. 

“There’s no way to meet these needs with today’s rigid metro architectures, where access and aggregation networks and the service edge all live in their own separate islands,” he added. “You need to break through those silos and find a way to support everything involved in modern metro services — physical network nodes, virtual network functions, virtual service edge — with the same infrastructure.”