Juniper Networks, experts in secure, AI-driven networks, has announced the innovation that will power its vision and strategy for Cloud Metro, a new category of solutions for service providers, optimised for metro transformation and sustainable business growth.
Traditional ‘retro’ metro networks are device-centric and are buckling under the extreme scale, agility, and experience demand that widespread digital transformation and the advent of 5G services are bringing.
Brendan Gibbs, Senior Vice President of Automated WAN Solutions, Juniper Networks said, “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 demand that this new era of OT transformation is bringing. This important industry shift requires the re-imagining and re-engineering of the metro network and Juniper is showing leadership here in its Cloud Metro portfolio. Service providers that want to deliver reliable, secure, and high-performing services at the metro edge with a sustainable business model should pay close attention.”
The new 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 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 optimise service experience, all while enabling service providers to sustain profitable business growth.
Juniper’s new Cloud Metro systems feature 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 breadth of interface options allow service providers to flex their investment economically in line with demand.