Juniper Networks, a leader in secure, AI-driven networks, announced the innovation that will power its vision and strategy for Cloud Metro – a new category of solutions for service providers, optimized for metro transformation and sustainable business growth.
Traditional "retro" metro networks are device-centric and are buckling under the extreme scale, agility and experience demands that widespread digital transformation and the advent of 5G services are bringing.
Today's announcement focuses on enabling sustainable business growth, with a series of high-performance networking systems, powered by AI-enabled, cloud-delivered automation, specifically designed to build next generation Cloud Metro infrastructure. These systems will deliver significantly-reduced natural resource consumption capabilities to help sustain the planet, improved tools and simplified working methods to help sustain over-pressured operations teams, along with embedded service assurance and security capabilities to optimize service experience, all while enabling service providers to sustain profitable business growth.
Juniper's new Cloud Metro systems uniquely feature industry-leading energy-efficient, adaptive power designs as their foundational principle, enabling unused features and Packet Forwarding Engines (PFEs) to be automatically switched off when not in use. The removable modular power shelf design reduces e-waste and extends system lifetimes by accommodating up to 48 times bandwidth growth within the same chassis. It is certified as Titanium grade by CLEAResult® in its 80 Plus program, the first and only metro networking device power module to accomplish such a rating.
The future-proofed scale, capacity, performance and smart features of Juniper's Cloud Metro portfolio replace the traditional 3-5 year 'rip-and-replace' network lifecycles with 7-12 year lifecycles. Pay-as-you-go models and a breadth of interface options allow service providers to flex their investment economically in line with demand.
Juniper's advanced use of AI and cloud-delivered automation equips service providers to simplify day-to-day workflows, deploy services faster (with device onboarding taking just minutes instead of hours), reduce trouble tickets and accelerate time-to-service (and therefore revenue) restoration. This significantly improves productivity, empowering network engineers and operators to accomplish more, which is critical for employee satisfaction and retention.
Brendan Gibbs, Senior Vice President of Automated WAN Solutions, Juniper Networks
In a world of "retro metros", Juniper's new Cloud Metro solution stands apart. Our cloud-delivered Paragon Automation-as-a-Service promises immediate productivity increases for service providers. Instead of building complex, time-consuming "DIY" automation solutions, they are empowered to focus on assuring service experiences for their customers. By extending our proven AI solution to the service provider WAN, we can improve productivity for customer operations teams by dramatically reducing trouble tickets and increasing network availability.
Caroline Chappell, Research Director, Cloud Practice, Analysys Mason
Digital transformation is moving into its next phase which is all about transforming operational technology (OT) and driving the distributed delivery of new applications and use cases based on emerging technologies such as AI and AR. The metro edge is key to supporting the massive data, real-time performance and sustainability demands that this new era of OT transformation is bringing.
