Juniper Mist ‘Pixie Dust’ Extended To Campus Fabric Management

The networking giant is adding VPN-VXLAN campus fabric management thanks to technology from its recent Apstra purchase. Juniper also added nine new “actions” to its AI engine, Marvis, for partners and enterprises.

Juniper Networks is adding campus fabric management via its recent Apstra purchase to its wired and wireless management platform and has introduced nine new actions to its Mist AI engine, Marvis.

Enterprises and partners now have access to Ethernet VPN, or EVPN-VXLAN campus fabric management through the Mist Cloud. The addition is based on data center management technology from Apstra, which Juniper acquired in January, said Jeff Aaron, vice president of enterprise marketing for Juniper.

EVPN-VXLAN technology can be complex to deploy and manage on its own, especially as more devices join the network. EVPN-VXLAN campus fabric management offered up through the Juniper Mist cloud will simplify wired, wireless and WAN because it’s all being done through the same cloud and AIOps engine, Aaron said. Using the technology through the Juniper cloud will remove the once manual process of configuration for IT teams.

“EVPN-VXLAN existed, but it was not an easy task to deploy -- you can’t create a VLAN for every new device. What we’ve done is really sprinkled the Mist pixie dust on EVPN-VXLAN and brought it under the Mist portfolio,” Aaron said. “A lot of the same benefits [enterprises] got already with our wired access, we’re now doing it with a EVPN-VXLAN.”

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Juniper in 2019 acquired AI-powered networking startup Mist Systems for $405 million for its cloud-native wireless LAN and AI technology. Since then, the company has been integrating Mist’s AI technology across both the wired and wireless LANs through Mist’s AI engine, Marvis.

The Marvis AIops engine has always offered up about a dozen “actions,” or potential fixes for problem areas that required attention. This time, however, Juniper Mist is addressing more difficult problems with the addition of nine more actions, including consistently failing clients or coverage holes, which are notoriously hard to detect, Aaron said.

“Coverage holes are one of those things that IT just doesn’t really know or hear about. Being able to detect that now and provide resolution to a basically needle in a haystack problem,” he said.

The Mist engine continues to appeal to partners, especially MSPs, because of the single interface that can be used to manage the wireless and wired domains. The approach gives partners more troubleshooting power and saves them time, Aaron said.

“If a customer has an issue with something not working, they can quickly figure out was it an issue with the [end device] software, or a coverage hole, or with the wired domain, like maybe there was a bad VLAN configured. By having Marvis correlate that information and come back and say, ‘It was a bad WAN link and you’re having packet loss issues. So you here’s your action,” he said. “That’s the power of having Marvis actions client to cloud.”

The campus fabric management offering is now available as part of the Juniper Mist Wired Assurance cloud offering. The nine new Mist actions are also now available to customers with a Marvis cloud subscription, according to the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company.