Juniper Networks and Canonical have announced an expansion of the global partnership between the two companies, which will see the co-development of a carrier-grade, OpenStack software solution.
The solution will enable service providers to virtualise core networks and network functions for increased scale and reliability. Juniper will also provide service support for Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system and Ubuntu OpenStack as part of Juniper Networks Contrail Cloud.
OpenStack is fast emerging as the preferred open-source cloud management platform due to its openness, interoperability, flexibility and active community of users, developers and vendors.
According to the most recent OpenStack Foundation global survey, Ubuntu is the most popular host and guest operating system for OpenStack, with more than half of all OpenStack instances running Ubuntu and 70% of the Public Cloud Guest operating system market.
Ankur Singla, corporate vice president and general manager, cloud software, Juniper Networks, said: "Juniper Networks firmly believes that open source and open standards will continue to drive greater levels of innovation and is pleased to partner with Canonical to help drive faster adoption of the cloud for telecommunication organizations."
"Our jointly developed converged Ubuntu and Juniper OpenStack solution will help deliver greater performance, scalability and reliability at lower costs."
Further to the partnership, Juniper and Canonical will collaborate and coordinate product development, engineering, marketing and upstream contributions in order to expand an open and functioning OpenStack ecosystem for service providers to deliver cloud and NFV solutions.
John Zannos, vice president, cloud channels and alliances, Canonical, said: "Juniper and Canonical are leading the OpenStack innovation agenda by jointly developing a virtualization solution that will help service providers accelerate cloud deployments for greater agility."
"Juniper’s Contrail addresses the carrier-class issues of virtualized environments and accelerates elastic service delivery across multi-tenant, hybrid cloud OpenStack deployments across a multi-vendor ecosystem."
"By combining Juniper’s open network solutions and leadership in the telecommunications industry with Canonical‘s leadership in OpenStack and scale-out open source, we will jointly be able to deliver cloud solutions that enable carriers to meet their network modernization challenges."
