With many service providers looking to transform their networks and evolve their business, Red Hat strongly believes that open source and cloud technologies have the potential to be the catalyst for the telecommunications industry transformation.

To meet growing customer expectations for faster, simpler and safer deployment and operations of distributed and scalable clouds, we are excited that Juniper Networks has expanded its collaboration with Red Hat to offer Contrail Cloud. The release of Contrail Cloud offers service providers an opportunity to deliver solutions from Juniper on a proven and trusted platform supported by Red Hat.

Red Hat started the relationship with Juniper with the integration of Contrail Networking and Red Hat OpenStack Platform through OpenStack’s Neutron networking API and plug-in interface. With this integration, telco customers can benefit from highly dynamic cloud orchestration with highly scalable connectivity with the added confidence that these products were tested together, certified and are supported by both vendors, respectively.

With Contrail Cloud, customers will have yet another choice in Contrail and Red Hat OpenStack Platform, but instead of requiring customers to work with both Juniper and Red Hat for their respective products, they will be able to work directly with Juniper to build, operate, and be supported, knowing that Red Hat is fully supporting Juniper as needed. With Contrail Cloud, telcos still have the option to interact and collaborate with both Juniper and Red Hat as needed. This is aimed at making telco cloud deployments easier, especially for those customers who see value in working with fewer or a single vendor, but with the ability to avoid vendor lock-in because their infrastructure is based on proven open source technologies and can be supported by Red Hat or others, if necessary.

Whether a customer chooses Contrail Cloud or Contrail Networking on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, they can experience benefits offered by Red Hat including:

  • Community innovation - Upstream-first innovation with leadership contribution to Linux, OpenStack, KVM, Open vSwitch, OPNFV, etc.

  • Optimized Portfolio - Co-engineering of Linux, KVM and OpenStack that are integrated and commercially hardened

  • NFV-ready OpenStack - Network features including CPU pinning, NUMA, Huge pages support, Packet Accelerators (SR-IOV, DPDK), input/output memory management unit (IOMMU); and certification and validation of third-rd party VNFs

Red Hat’s core competitive advantage is our demonstrated leadership in the entire cloud stack and by collaborating with Juniper on Contrail Cloud we are building on top of this. Contrail cloud includes Red Hat technologies such as Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. To learn more about Contrail Cloud, visit: https://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/sdn/contrail/contrail-cloud/