Menlo Park, CA – January 28, 2020 – Apstra® Inc., the leader in Intent-Based Networking for the data center announces the latest product release, Apstra AOS 3.2, to empower IT with increased control and flexibility of their data center network operations without increasing budget or adding resources. Apstra AOS 3.2 dramatically reduces the cost of operations, prevents outages, accelerates deployments and augments existing talent for some of the largest enterprise data centers in the world. Apstra abstracts complexity with a sophisticated software layer, and full automation of network function services that adapts to real-time changes.
Apstra AOS dramatically simplifies the management of data center networks, and now with AOS 3.2, the major enhancements include:
— Industry’s First and Only Intent Time Voyager Capability to Dramatically Decrease MTTR from Network Outages
— Intra and Inter Data Center Scale-out Services
— Expanded Enterprise-Class Open Source Open Compute Project SONiC Support
— Faster Insights into the Health and Service Assurance of Network Fabrics with Customizable Dashboards, Probes, and Widgets
Industry’s First and Only Intent Time Voyager Capability to Dramatically Decrease MTTR From Network Outages
Apstra AOS 3.2 enables IT to recover quickly from mishaps caused by humans or machines by enabling network engineers to recover their entire data center fabric state, configuration, and real time continuous validation to a specific point in time; backward or forward with a few simple clicks. This dramatically accelerates time to recovery from network failures and brownouts. This unique Intent Time Voyager capability is enabled by the Apstra AOS single source of truth and self-documenting capability, which also provides assurance validations about the drift between the intended and operational state of the entire fabric.
Intra and Inter Data Center Scale-out Services
With the latest version of Apstra AOS, businesses can easily scale-out their services within the data center itself or across data centers to support increased demands, and to implement migration and disaster recovery strategies. Those scale-out services are enabled by the following new capabilities introduced in AOS 3.2:
— Automation of EVPN DCI to allow VXLAN Data Center Interconnect with a simple, intuitive user interface and continuous DCI state validations.
— Automation of EVPN VXLAN overlay across PODs in a 5-stage L3 Clos fabric, including continuous validations of BGP EVPN sessions and route expectations.
Expanded Enterprise-Class Open Source SONiC Support
With expanded enterprise-class open source SONiC support, Apstra AOS 3.2 increases the network engineers’ choice of vendor options when designing and building cloud-scale data center networks by deploying open source platforms like SONiC, allowing for dramatically lower CapEx spend. The SONiC community release is now supported by Apstra in 3-stage, 5-stage architectures as leaf, spine or superspine data center networks.
Service-Oriented Dashboards – Enabling Faster Insights into the Health and Service Assurance of Network Fabrics
AOS 3.2 helps network operators get fast insight into the health of their network fabrics. Network operators can now easily create their own dashboards, probes, and widgets to get information about a large variety of parameters – such as device health, EVPN validations, throughput health, drain validation, traffic trends, virtual infrastructure redundancy checks, and fabric health for virtual infrastructures.
AOS 3.2 also provides improved visibility into the spare capacity in existing PODs, e.g. the number of racks that can still be added to existing POD – without having network operators need to manually count the remaining number of spine ports, or leaf ports for each POD.
With AOS 3.2, all collected telemetry and analytics can be streamed to external data stores for further analysis.
“Apstra AOS 3.2 is packed with innovative capabilities such as the industry’s first and only Intent Time Voyager capability which allows you to travel through the history of your network, and bring your network back to any known state in time helping to resolve network outages,” said Sean Hafeez, VP of Product at Apstra. “In addition, the latest product offers continued support for OCP SONiC, which enables network engineers to safely add newer OSS offerings to their networking toolkit.”
“As data centers continue to play a critical role in allowing enterprises to scale to the cloud, open networks must provide a new level of control and flexibility, enable innovation and keep costs in check,” said Drew Schulke, vice president, Dell EMC Networking. “And given our commitment at Dell Technologies to continue to innovate and help speed up the learning curve for operations throughout the lifecycle of the network, our customers have the opportunity to take advantage of AOS and Apstra’s support for SONiC to reduce their spend and serve as a catalyst to transform their industry.”
“As a leading global digital transformation company, we provide a broad range of services and solutions to enterprises seeking to achieve successful digital transformation initiatives to simplify data center management challenges. A key component of that success is by providing innovative, ground-breaking solutions to address data center challenges. Apstra’s AOS Intent-Based Networking helps to build, operate, troubleshoot and secure the data center networks and it plays a key role in helping to achieve successful outcomes,” said, Jordi Benet, Infrastructure Consulting, Data Center & Cloud, Accenture.
“Customers that want to accelerate digital transformation are looking for innovative market solutions that will give them a competitive advantage, help to improve customer experience and increase market share. Apstra’s first and only Intent Time Voyager capability offers a solution that provides unique customer value and differentiation, and is key to our success as a partner. Apstra AOS is enabling customers to dramatically accelerate Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) by as much as 70%,” said Khalid Laban, CEO of Oxygen, Value-Added Distributor in the META region.
