Juniper Networks expands its AI-driven enterprise portfolio with new features

Juniper Networks has expanded its AI-driven enterprise portfolio with new features that enable customers to expand and simplify campus wired and wireless network rollouts while providing better visibility and automation to network operators. The Juniper Mist cloud and AI engine enhancements, which include EVPN-VXLAN campus fabric management and additional Marvis Actions for proactive problem remediation, build on Juniper’s unique automation, AIOps, and cloud capabilities to streamline IT operations, reduce costs, and deliver agility and scale.

“Juniper is committed to Experience-First Networking, where our enterprise solutions leverage proactive automation, assured user experiences, agile cloud services, and connected security to deliver the best end-user and operator experiences from client to-cloud,” said Jeff Aaron, Vice President of Enterprise Marketing at Juniper.

Further said, “In the campus and branch, this means leveraging AIOps, driven by Mist AI and the cloud to maximize user productivity and efficiency while minimizing IT costs through simplified operations and prescriptive insights. Today, we are excited to accelerate in these areas – and further distance ourselves from the competition – with new enhancements to our Juniper Mist Wired Assurance, Wireless Assurance and MarvisVirtual Network Assistant (VNA) cloud services that make it even easier to deploy, operate and troubleshoot campus networks at scale.” 

The latest additions to Juniper’s AI-driven enterprise include:

• AI-driven fabric management via the Juniper Mist Cloud : Campus networks have frequently relied on proprietary technology and convoluted L2/L3 architectures that were not built to satisfy the modern demands of today’s growing number of mobile users and Internet of Things devices. Furthermore, while EVPN-VXLAN technology has several benefits over traditional fabric management alternatives, it can be difficult to set up and operate. Juniper offers the potential to simplify wired, wireless, and WAN via a shared cloud and AIOps engine by providing EVPN-VXLAN campus fabric management via the Juniper Mist Wired Assurance cloud service.

Juniper EVPN-VXLAN fabric uses the same Juniper platform that manages campus wired access, Juniper Mist Wired Assurance, and the MarvisVirtual Network Assistant (VNA), giving IT managers unprecedented automation and insight and troubleshooting. This not only creates a consistent operational framework for all wired access deployments, configurations, and Day 2 operations, but it also employs a single AI-driven support model that uses self-driving operations and predictive actions to prevent problems from occurring in the first place. Administrators can use the Juniper Mist Cloud to select a topology, create networks of interest, identify required physical connections, and apply the in a smooth manner, correct underlying policies. Customers may also use a single operating schema across LAN, WLAN, and WAN settings with the Juniper Mist solution, which is a significant aspect of Juniper’s client-to-cloud distinction.

•  New Marvis Actions that provide deeper insight for faster problem remediation: Marvis Actions uses information gleaned from the Mist AI engine, such as the core cause of an issue, to provide IT administrators with actionable solutions via a simple dashboard. It is the first – and in many cases, only – place where customers can monitor and control the health of their Juniper Mist network, providing unparalleled simplicity, intelligence, and ease of use across Juniper wired, wireless, and SD-WAN networks.

Juniper has continually added additional capabilities to the MarvisVNA since its launch in 2018 to help solve common issues such as misconfigured VLANs, offline devices, non-compliant software, DHCP/802.1x/PSK failures, and loops. Additional actions have now been introduced to the MarvisVNA software subscription to detect and rectify even more wired/wireless/WAN issues, including continuously failed wired/wireless clients, faulty cables, AP coverage holes, problematic WAN connectivity, and insufficient RF capacity, among others.

Juniper continues to deliver on the Enterprise-First Network vision through product innovation and real-world results for its customers and partners throughout the world in a variety of vertical industries. Juniper Networks was positioned as a leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure, with Juniper having the highest capacity to execute within the Leaders’ Quadrant. Juniper was also selected as a Visionary in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Indoor Location Services, Global, for 2021.

Supporting Quotes:

“Juniper Networks has built out a very capable automation portfolio for the enterprise that has the potential to ease network deployment and ongoing operations. From my perspective, this announcement centered on AI-driven campus fabric management furthers the company’s focus in delivering a best-in-class IT operator experience. The interface looks clean, intuitive, and supports a number of topologies that should speed what typically tedious configuration tasks are.”

• Will Townsend, Principal Analyst, Networking and Security Practices, Moor Insights & Strategy 

“We see the adoption of ML and AI for network operations is instrumental in tackling the ever-growing complexity of network configuration and management. Juniper Wired Assurance SLEs and Marvis Actions provide IT operators like us with insights into the health of the network beyond isolated SNMP-based metrics. The AI-driven infrastructure can correlate events received from various network devices, detect anomalies, take corrective action, and easily integrate with 3rd party systems with the use of open APIs. Plus, the Juniper Mist AI-driven campus fabric management utilizes the Juniper Mist Cloud to bring simplicity and automation in deployment that we don’t see in traditional campus networks.”

• Andy Piatek, Digital Solutions Director, Novus Technical Services