MENLO PARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Users have been vocal that data center networks need to improve agility, reduce costs and avoid downtime. They are managing their networks manually box by box; they are unable to select hardware of their choosing because of operational complexity; and they lack the tools and visibility to efficiently diagnose problems and prevent outages. Consequently, their data center networks do not adequately support their business goals. Time to market for network services is critical.
Apstra, Inc., the company automating the data center network, today announced the Apstra Operating System (AOS), a vendor-agnostic distributed operating system that enables network leaders to take control of their network and:
- Provides unmatched visibility through high-resolution, real time telemetry that continuously validates performance and configuration and detects anomalies
- Delivers operational simplicity and agility through powerful intent-driven automation that enables network engineers to rapidly convert their business intent into specific designs and blueprints
- Massively reduces Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) through powerful vendor-agnostic automation that leverages the choice of hardware
Using AOS, data center network operators can stand up a new multi-vendor data center network without tripping over subtle vendor-specific configuration issues, track the configuration and performance of the network from a single pane of glass, and perform normal maintenance actions by simple intent-based specifications, minimizing exposure to errors.
AOS is implemented as a distributed platform that runs a turnkey application, as well as community code that sits on top of an existing physical and virtual network infrastructure. At the core of the AOS platform is a distributed data store that scales to the largest data centers, providing visibility into telemetry, configuration and incident data. AOS provides platform services through RESTful APIs that can be leveraged across various applications including workflow management, resource management, device management, and streaming functions. The AOS turnkey application automates end-to-end network services in the context of data center networks. AOS is interoperable with leading vendors’ data center hardware as well as Linux-based containerized environments.
AOS started early field trials in August 2015 and will be generally available this summer.
Quotes:
“SDN industry efforts have served to rally sentiments and give users a
voice, but not a comprehensive solution. The Apstra Operating System is
the first vendor-agnostic distributed operating system for the data
center network that empowers CIOs and network architects to take
control, transform how they build and operate their networks, and start
a journey similar to what the server teams initiated 10 years ago to
deliver business value. We are grateful for the tremendous customer
response.”
Mansour Karam, Apstra, CEO and Founder
"Apstra has developed the best automation platform for building and
operating networks that I've seen to date. To put it plainly: it works.
It’s easy to install and use, provides great network visibility, works
on equipment from many vendors, and improves security. We use AOS at
Awnix, and we're incorporating it into the designs for our Engineered
Systems for OpenStack with SDN.”
Rick Kundiger, Awnix CEO
“Apstra has built the first vendor-agnostic architecture and abstraction
layer with closed loop telemetry that enables seamless deployments of
best of breed products from various vendors. This is not easy to do.
Network agility, visibility, and time to delivery are critical to
supporting modern business requirements. We were glad to work closely
with the Apstra team on the first version of this promising platform
that will provide network automation, visibility, and choice to
technology teams in the future.”
Karl Armani, Medallia Head of
Global Infrastructure and Cloud Engineering
“Businesses are demanding a more agile IT infrastructure, no longer
hampered by vendor lock-in or forced hardware refresh. Incumbent vendors
have been slow to respond, conscious that greater choice and reduced
cost will have a massive impact on their top line revenue. However a new
breed of ‘Cloud Native’ software vendors are enabling end users to
design hardware-agnostic solutions whilst remaining in complete control
of their environment. With its intent based networking deployment Apstra
not only removes the necessity for the specific vendor CLI or GUI, but
truly delivers on the long term promise of SDN.”
Jason Dance,
BigTec Managing Director
“Business leaders need a solution for the data center network that
unlocks their expertise and empowers them to close the gap between
business demands and network service delivery. Apstra is a force
multiplier to ensure the network is ready for business.”
Ernest
Lefner, ONUG Co-Founder and Co-Chairman
“I have had the opportunity to be among the first in financial services
to have lab tested some of the most disruptive networking products
currently on the market. Networks are heterogeneous collections of
vendor equipment, operating systems, and domain functions all with
proprietary command sets, monitoring semantics, and APIs. Managing the
'network service' today is a distributed systems problem, plain and
simple. The network community needs a vendor-agnostic abstraction layer
to normalize these vendor differences and allow us to take full
advantage of our network.”
James
Younan, Founding ONUG Board Member
"ONUG provides ideas and permission for vendors to build what users
require across the entire IT stack. Apstra is a prime example of
innovation that has emerged out of the ONUG narrative, and the first to
deliver a user mandate for a true vendor-agnostic platform. AOS is a
purpose-built distributed operating system that delivers intent-based
abstractions and telemetry to enable IT business leaders to swap out
vendors as they build out their hybrid cloud infrastructure and address
the huge gap that exists between the cloud and enterprise data center
network."
Nick
Lippis, ONUG Co-Founder and Co-Chairman
“Disaggregation, network automation and orchestration, and open
networking offer opportunities for transformational change within the
networking marketplace. The decoupling of hardware and software
represents the potential for a fundamental improvement in how networks
are designed, procured, managed, and evolved. The potential for
long-term innovation to emerge with an open SDN-based marketplace is
clearly disruptive to what has traditionally been a hardware-centric
model.”
Mark Fabbi, Andrew Lerner, Danilo Ciscato - Gartner
Magic Quadrant for Data Center Networking, May 16, 2016 # G00278427
“The secret sauce is that intent is by nature declarative and not
imperative. AOS software extracts value out of multi-vendor hardware by
delivering it as an easily consumable service in response to the
specification of declarative intent by the consumer. On top of that,
intent and expectation-driven telemetry ensures that AOS extracts more
knowledge about the system's health by gathering less data, while at the
same time allowing a network operator to insert their expertise into the
system.”
Sasha Ratkovic, Apstra CTO and Founder
“Many people dramatically underestimate the complexities of building a
highly scalable distributed full tolerant system. We have invested
heavily in our distributed systems architecture to support a
vendor-agnostic platform extensible enough to automate the network. One
of the problems in doing it earlier was that the ingredients weren't
there: extensibility of switch operating systems, APIs, and many people
approached this from configuration as the starting point. We believe
that telemetry is the starting point, to understand what is going on
before you try and control it. One of the reasons that SDN efforts have
been less fruitful than you would expect is that they tackled the
problem at the control plane level, whereas the real problem is, in
fact, at the management level. We're tackling the problem at the
management level and exploiting mature control planes that exist in
every switch operating system.”
David Cheriton, Apstra Chief
Scientist and Founder
View a video here.
About Apstra, Inc.
Apstra is redefining how data center networks are built and operated and has developed the first and only vendor-agnostic, intent-driven distributed operating system to deliver operational simplicity, control and choice to make the network an asset in accomplishing a company’s business goals. Apstra was founded by industry veterans Mansour Karam, David Cheriton, and Sasha Ratkovic, experts in networking, intent-based abstraction architectures, and distributed systems. The company is based in Menlo Park and is privately funded.
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@apstrainc launches intent driven, vendor agnostic #datacenter network automation to deliver on #SDN #cloud http://apstra.com/press/apstra-introduces-the-first-vendor-agnostic-intent-driven-distributed-operating-system-to-automate-the-data-center-network-june-22-2016/
