Juniper Networks and IBM pursue shared IT transformation vision
IBM has recently significantly expanded its partnership with Juniper Networks to deliver best-of-breed networking solutions for data centres. The portfolio, called IBM Data Center Networking (DCN) solutions, aims to help government and education organisations consolidate their infrastructures and achieve lower on-going costs, freeing up resources and enabling them to focus on serving their users.
The DCN portfolio provides a fully integrated, simple to manage infrastructure for the corporate data centre, all backed by services and support for the engagement’s life cycle. This fits well with what the market is currently demanding: end-user organisations are looking to reduce costs and resolve inefficient network utilisation. They often struggle with difficult systems management and administration processes whilst coping with switch and specialised device sprawl. Without doubt, they will be looking to reducing complexity by automating network management and these types of pre-packaged propositions may be the answer.
Broader relationship
The new partnership represents a broadening of the relationship between IBM and Juniper. Since 2007, the two companies have been working together on joint technology solutions, standards development, network management and managed security services. Specifically in the data centre, IBM has included Juniper Networks switching, routing and security products into its data centre network portfolio with IBM playing an invaluable role of systems integrator.
Analysts have welcomed the co-operation, claiming that it signals a shift at IBM. “My read on what is happening is that IBM is returning to becoming a true integrator and will more actively look out for the best interests of their customers as well as their own best interests,” Gartner’s Mark Fabbi has said. “Having some alternatives will aid in this. This will result in a re balancing of their past thinking which basically equated networking with Cisco. In IBM’s case, when they are in control of an account – for example a large data centre consolidation project – you will see them select what they feel is the best solution for the customer and their own financial position and it won’t always be Cisco.”
Most recently, the two companies jointly collaborated on a demonstration highlighting how enterprises can seamlessly extend their private data centre clouds. The demonstration between Silicon Valley and Shanghai showed a case in which customers could take advantage of remote servers in a secure public cloud to ensure high priority applications are given preference over the lower priority ones when computing resources become constrained. IBM and Juniper are installing these advanced networking capabilities into IBM’s nine worldwide Cloud Labs for customer engagements. Once installed in the nine Cloud Labs, IBM and Juniper will be able to move client computing workloads between private and publicly managed cloud environments enabling customers to reliably deliver on service level agreements.
For the past year, IBM and Juniper have also been working together on the Stratus Project, Juniper’s initiative to create a single data centre fabric that will deliver a quantum jump in scale, performance and simplicity, with the flexibility to support fully converged and virtualised data centre environments. The Stratus Project will address the modern mega data centre’s pain points and aims to enable cloud computing to fulfil its potential.
Continued research and innovation in cloud computing security has been another focus for IBM and Juniper. The companies are jointly researching cloud computing security models to highlight how customers can mitigate attacks on corporate data and computer systems.
Enabler of dynamic infrastructure
The two companies’ joint work appears to have a decent fit with the issues faced across the industry. The economy and the increased emphasis on cost savings make data centre networking an area of concern for many organisations. Everyone is under pressure to reduce costs and old infrastructure is expensive to manage. Networking is a key enabler to dynamic infrastructure which is central to promoting long-term data centre efficiency as well as manageability.
Dynamic infrastructures require the integration and central management of networking, storage and servers. IBM’s total solution portfolio offers not only servers, storage, software, and networking but also the reliable services needed to tie it all together. User organisations are suffering with too many network layers, devices, operating systems and complex management applications. There is high latency, time consuming deployment and troubleshooting and the network is difficult to manage. A simple topology with fewer layers and fewer devices significantly reduces power, cooling and space requirements, is required along with improved performance for reduced congestion and latency, simple to configuration and troubleshooting with increased reliability.