Juniper and Canonical Deepen Partnership Focused on OpenStack, Telcos
Back in 2013, Juniper Networks announced Contrail, a network overlay platform for software-defined networking for enterprises and cloud service providers. The company also announced that the Contrail source code would be open. Now, Juniper Networks and Canonical have expanded their existing partnership and they will oversee co-development of a carrier-grade, OpenStack software solution as part of Contrail Cloud.
According to the announcement:
"Service providers are working to profitably address growing end-user demand for data capacity while more quickly delivering new, innovative services to subscribers. To accomplish this, carriers are continually looking to cloud platforms to make their infrastructure more agile and automated to support these goals. By combining Juniper Networks’ expertise in cloud network offerings for telecommunications customers with Canonical’s OpenStack and open source leadership, Canonical and Juniper are providing open, scalable, cost-effective, and carrier-grade cloud solutions on which carriers can build a virtualized IP platform and support network functions virtualization (NFV)."
"Contrail Networking’s connection with Ubuntu Server OS and Ubuntu OpenStack as the default platform for cloud deployments began with Juniper Networks and the OpenContrail project participating in Canonical’s OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL), an integration lab in which Canonical tests its cloud partners’ products in Ubuntu OpenStack configurations, for automated testing of Contrail with Ubuntu OpenStack. The addition of the joint carrier-grade OpenStack solution will leverage and expand on OIL to provide enhanced testing to ensure the solution meets the demanding needs of carriers."
Many people don't realize how popular Ubuntu is as a basis for OpenStack cloud deployments. According to the most recent OpenStack Foundation global survey, Ubuntu is the most popular host and guest operating system for OpenStack, with more than half of all OpenStack instances running Ubuntu, and 70 percent of the Public Cloud Guest operating system market.
“Juniper Networks firmly believes that open source and open standards will continue to drive greater levels of innovation and is pleased to partner with Canonical to help drive faster adoption of the cloud for telecommunication organizations. Our jointly developed converged Ubuntu and Juniper OpenStack solution will help deliver greater performance, scalability and reliability at lower costs," said Ankur Singla, corporate vice president and general manager, cloud software, Juniper Networks, in a statement.
“Juniper and Canonical are leading the OpenStack innovation agenda by jointly developing a virtualization solution that will help service providers accelerate cloud deployments for greater agility. Juniper’s Contrail addresses the carrier-class issues of virtualized environments and accelerates elastic service delivery across multi-tenant, hybrid cloud OpenStack deployments across a multi-vendor ecosystem. By combining Juniper’s open network solutions and leadership in the telecommunications industry with Canonical’s leadership in OpenStack and scale-out open source, we will jointly be able to deliver cloud solutions that enable carriers to meet their network modernization challenges," added John Zannos, vice president, cloud channels and alliances, at Canonical.