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Juniper® Apstra by
Beyond Technology
The TOTAL Solution for Automating
Data Center Networks
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Data Center Automation:

The Key to the Future

As businesses look towards 2023—and beyond—they face many

challenges and stresses. These include economic uncertainty,
regional conflicts, supply chain restrictions, and staff shortages. For
all these reasons, it will be increasingly important to leverage
investments, including process automation, workplace
transformation, and improvement of customer experiences, to
increase corporate resilience1.

With business requirements evolving, IT departments

must align their systems and processes to ensure
business continuity, drive greater productivity, and help
organizations quickly adapt to ever-evolving business
environments and requirements.

Similarly, in this era of unprecedented change, people have also

altered how they work, live, and play. Digital transformation has
increased data center traffic at an accelerated rate, making manual
monitoring, troubleshooting, and remediation too slow and too
risky to be effective.
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70% of organizations will implement

infrastructure automation by 20252.

Gartner

Yinuo Geng, vice president of Gartner, states that Infrastructure

and Operations automation technologies can support IT
departments in enabling speed to market, increasing business
agility, and ensuring compliance with security and regulatory
requirements while simultaneously optimizing service costs3.

1 IDC (2022). IDC FutureScape: Top 10 Worldwide Future of Connectedness Predictions accessed November 2022.
2 ibid.
3 Gartner (2022). Gartner Survey Finds 85% of Infrastructure and Operations Leaders Without Full Automation Expect to Increase Automation Within Three
Years Accessed November 2022.
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Challenges of managing
data centers networks

Digital transformation is crucial for most organizations today, and

data center technologies have evolved to support this goal.
Unfortunately, network operations lag behind the transformation
curve and often inhibit change rather than fostering it.

Higher volumes of data traffic, more applications, distributed

end-users, and fewer resources are just trends that have network
teams scrambling to keep up with daily demands.

This is where Intent-Based Networking (IBN) software comes into

play when any of the following situations are present:

Human error: People are prone to making mistakes, and they're usually
not good at repetitive tasks over a long period of time.

Inadequate automation: Most automation tools only accept inputs for

specific tasks and output configurations specific to your current network.
If your network changes, your scripts must too. In addition, they often
lack optimal error-checking capabilities.
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Data fog: Focusing on the correct data at the right time is challenging, as
different data can be relevant or not at different periods.

Outdated documentation: Keeping documentation up to date is a

challenge, especially for networks that support modern digital services
that change second by second.

Applications and hardware of various vendors: These cross-vendor

connections may be faulty due to unreliable protocols.

Gaps between design and operation: Typically, the architects who

design the network are unaware of the changes made to the network,
while the operators who manage the network are not fully informed of
the known capabilities and limits of the system.

Handling Large Amounts of Information: Operators often must deal

with massive amounts of telemetry data collected by traditional managed
systems.

Cumbersome scalability: Traditional network-managed systems focus

on the data center’s size, which leads to the constant need to reconfigure
the system after every change in the network.

Skyrocketing Expenses: The nature of modern data centers with

multiple vendors for specific solutions create massive costs.
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Intent-Based Networking (IBN) can help overcome these obstacles

and others that stand in the way of successful transformation by
moving the network from fragmented node-by-node management
to an autonomous network, regardless of the supplier or operating
system of its network devices.

The uptick in industry demand for IBNs is attributed to the increase in

wireless network devices in commercial settings, as well as to the
growth of broadband infrastructure and the predominant need for
effective network infrastructure management by companies.

The global Intent-Based Networking

(IBN) market is projected to grow by
30% through 20264.
Global Market
Insights

4 Global Market Insights (2022). Intent-based Networking (IBN) Market Size by Component (Software, Networking Hardware [Routers, Switches, Firewall],
Service [Professional Services, Managed Services]), By Deployment Model (On-Premises, Cloud), By Application (BFSI, Healthcare, Government & Defense, IT
& Telecom, Manufacturing), COVID-19 Impact Analysis, Regional Outlook, Growth Potential, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2023 – 2032 accessed
November 2022.
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When the intention is what matters:

How Do Intent-Based Networks (IBN) Work?

At the heart of an IBN conceptual architecture is a background that

contains all the information needed to deploy and maintain a system
based on the expressed intent. Abstractions, inventory, infrastructure,
and reference design provide this information.

The system runs, adjusts, and self-corrects based on the technical

objectives expressed during its configuration, thus reducing operating
expenses.
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With this raw information, intent-based networking software (IBNS)

can assemble a validated best-practice or working solution. The
project sends the configuration to the infrastructure, which
“informs” the project about state changes and anything else that
might affect the fulfillment of the intentions.

Networks change, both intentionally and unintentionally. Faced

with this ever-evolving trend, an IBNS must use intent-based
analysis (IBA) to be aware of network changes in real-time, ensuring
its services comply with their intent.

There are two types of changes:

Uncontrolled changes are failures that occur unexpectedly.

Controlled changes include configuration or additions, variations

in configuration, or elimination of an item.

These types of changes can also cause things to “break.” This is

where IBA comes in, providing actionable insights to address
changes in the network. To accomplish this, it examines the data in
the network, detecting conditions of interest, and then classifies
the relationships between these changes. This way, the data and its
connections are stored as a graph.
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Simplifying Data Center

Network Operations:
Automation Is the Solution

It's no longer enough to have a great, scalable network alone. A data

center can have tens of thousands of devices, presenting a huge
operational challenge for IT. For this reason, automation is critical to
facilitating network operations, from provisioning to day-to-day
management.

There is no way to deliver cloud-native services or cloud-like customer

experiences using the slow manual processes of yesterday. Simplifying
data center network operations is critical to keeping any business
competitive in today's demanding markets.
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Apstra is the only solution of its kind with multi-vendor

support, empowering organizations to automate and
manage their networks in virtually any location, with any
provider and topology.

Its validated templates and zero-touch provisioning ensure reliable data

center operations and reduced deployment times, while Apstra
Freeform's capability allows for additional customization.

Using a single source of truth, powerful analytics, and root cause

identification, Apstra enables network teams to identify and resolve
problems quickly.
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Apstra also prevents interruptions with predictive

information. The software shortens the time to resolution
with advanced telemetry and decreases human error with
change control and fast, full-network reversal.

This multi-vendor, turnkey automation solution enables you to

design, build, implement, and operate data center networks from
a single panel. It also includes continuous validations in real-time to
instantly identify and resolve problems across all infrastructure
silos, regardless of vendor or hardware.

Being intent-based, Apstra increases application availability and

reliability, simplifies deployment and operations, and dramatically
reduces business costs.
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Advantages of
Juniper Apstra
®

This solution also controls operating expenses (OPEX) and transforms

the way you operate your network so you can reap the following
benefits:

Managed complexity: Breaks operational tasks into their

simplest elements and automates them into the expected results.

Risk management: Eliminates human error in the flow from

expressed intent to creating and deploying specific configurations.

Managed Data Fog: Obtains information from your network’s

massive data collection, eliminating the OPEX associated with
extracting the data you need at a specific time.

Increased reliability: Changes to the network under IBN are

faster and can often be done in production mode.

Standardized Web Segments: Using validated blueprints and

best practices enables reliable industry-standard web segments.
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Accelerated Agility: Adapt to changes and new applications

without significant structural changes. Agility is directly linked to
OPEX savings.

Frees up your experts: Spend less time fighting “fires” and more
time on strategic initiatives.

Consider your options: Put design first and deal with the vendor
details in the background.

Go from days to minutes: After migrating to an IBN system,

taking a project from design to implementation to acceptance
testing, is a question of minutes instead of days.

Reliable Change Tracking: Apstra creates a Single Source of

Truth (SSOT) in the intent data store and the follow-up of all
movements, additions, and network changes. It tracks changes
made to the network by other systems and provides simple
workflows for implementing changes across the entire network.

Fast recovery from human error: Through the Intent Time

Voyager feature, Apstra speeds up troubleshooting time by
allowing the operator to move the entire network state forward or
backward with a few clicks, returning it to a specific point in time.
In addition, it offers predictive analytics, continuous validation,
and proactive anomaly alerts to counter errors before they impact
the business.
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Enhanced Network Compliance: By offering the ability to trace

the source of network changes, Apstra helps ensure granular
compliance where it is needed. You can use intent-based policy
guarantees, connectivity restrictions for multi-vendor
environments, and role-based access control (RBAC).

Looking at the IBN characteristics: With the IBN, information not

only flows down from the IBNS to the infrastructure based on your
expressed intent but also flows up from the infrastructure to the
IBNS. This two-way flow extends the IBN through all phases of the
network life cycle: design, construction, deployment, and
validation.

Proven Success:
Apstra's Positive Business Impact

Users of the solution report favorable results, such as reduced data

center planning costs, savings in deployments and operations, and
low replacement costs of existing tools.

Apstra offers network teams a tool that enables simplification of all

stages of the data center service life cycle, reducing configuration
errors and ensuring network reliability and security.
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With this in mind, Juniper Networks commissioned Forrester

Consulting5 to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to
examine the potential return on investment (ROI) tthat organizations
can obtain by deploying the solution. This effort aims to provide one
more aspect to evaluate the potential financial impact of Apstra in
organizations.

Forrester’s results demonstrated that Apstra not only helps

companies automate and validate the design, implementation, and
operation of data centers, but it also offers a wide range of
favorable results for any company, including a return on
investment of 320% to three years.
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Enabled By Apstra
May 2022

But not only that: to better understand the benefits, costs, and risks
associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed four
decision-makers with experience using Juniper® Apstra.

The study aggregated the experiences of the interviewees and

combined the results into a single composite organization based on
the characteristics of the organizations interviewed.

Here are the findings:

Zero day: design cost savings. The solution reduces the scope of
requirements and design time by 60%.

Day one: implementation cost savings. The solution reduces

deployment time from 24 hours to 2 hours per device.

Day Two+: Savings on Data Center Operations. The solution

reduces the required FTE (Full Time Equivalent) hours by 60%.

Tool replacement cost provides savings of over $358,000 USD.

Other economic benefits:

Multi-vendor management
Faster time to market
Standardized configuration across all data centers
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According to interviewees, some of the biggest benefits are the

increased speed and reduced resource requirements.

Other recurring benefits mentioned were the continued

sustainability of the network. Specifically, as changes are made to
the controller, and the controller drives the configuration, a much
more standardized configuration is achieved across the board.

For whom it is?

Companies that can benefit from Apstra

Due to its characteristics, Apstra offers unmatched advantages for

virtually any type of company with the following characteristics:

Companies with the need to store or backup information within

their physical data centers

Companies in which availability of their data centers is crucial, as

well as rapid deployment of new services from one place to another

Companies that seek to improve the response time of requests to

their data centers distributed in different branches or geographies

Corporates that have edge data centers, branch offices, and

colocation facilities.
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An Invaluable Partner's Guide:

The Best Implementation with Beyond
Technology Methodology

As IT requirements evolve at an unprecedented rate, deployments

and migrations can be challenging, costly, and resource intensive.
But it doesn’t have to be like that.

The professional services of Beyond Technology, a technological

integrator and Juniper Networks Elite partner are the best option
to implement the Juniper Apstra solution. Beyond Technology
®

provides consulting, design, and implementation of this new

environment so companies do not have to hire or divert their
internal resources.
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Beyond Technology offers multiple ways to bring you

industry-leading automation solutions to drive real business
results through a unique and proven methodology:
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Acerca de Beyond Technology

Beyond Technology has over 30 years of experience integrating

technology across multiple industries and different parts of the
world. Beyond Technology is the parent company of GEMA
International, a company that provides mobility services in more
than 80 countries with headquarters in Switzerland. Beyond
Technology has expanded to enable the transformation of
businesses through technology. The key to its globalization has its
roots in its organizational philosophy, which includes programs
such as Beyond Essence (the culture of the company), its business
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transformation platform (Beyondware™) and its Beyond Balance

program, which fosters a balance between the work and the
personal life for its collaborators.

In this way, Beyond Technology is focused on being a community

that generates well-being and significance for employees, clients,
strategic partners, and society while creating a positive
environmental impact.

Beyond Technology's comprehensive and differentiated offer lies

in its providing the latest technologies, empathetic and certified
professionals, innovation in applications and processes, and a
business ecosystem focused on its clients.

Apstra's intent-based networking software automates

and validates the design, deployment, and operations of
data center networks from day 0 to day 2+ because we
know that THE DATA CENTER is KEY TO YOUR BUSINESS
SUCCESS.
@BeyondTechnologyGlobal

beyondtechnology.net

55 8004 4574