Juniper brings AI to data center operations

Marvis Minis set up a digital twin of a customer’s network environment to simulate and test user connections, validate network configurations, and find/detect problems without users being present and without requiring any additional hardware, according to Juniper. “Minis simulate end user, device, and application traffic to learn the network configuration to proactively determine network issues,” Gilby said. “Data from Minis is continuously fed back into the Mist AI engine, providing an additional source of insight for the best AIOps responses.”

Marvis VNA for Data Center is a central dashboard for customers to see and manage campus, branch, and data center resources. Using Marvis’ natural language and integrated generative AI, the VNA looks at everything from cabling and configuration to monitoring network links and other operational issues, Gilby said.

The Marvis conversational interface lets IT teams pose direct queries and it highlights anomalies and recommended actions in data center switching devices, virtual infrastructure, physical and logical connectivity, and security, according to Juniper. The idea is to enable faster root cause identification and issue resolution, the company said.

In addition, Juniper said the Apstra software has been upgraded to better process AI/ML traffic over Ethernet, including congestion management, load balancing and flow control. InfiniBand was the first AI connectivity option, because many GPUs support it, but Juniper thinks, ultimately, Ethernet is the way AI networking development will go, Gilby said.

Juniper is part of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium, which was founded last year to develop physical, link, transport and software layer Ethernet advances – in particular to handle the performance, scale and bandwidth required to keep up with AI demands. The consortium includes AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden, HPE, Intel, Meta and Microsoft Dell, DriveNets, Fujitsu Limited, Huawei, Nokia and others.

Along with tweaking the Apstra software to better support Ethernet, Juniper added high-density 800GE routers and line cards to its PTX Series of boxes.