Net One Simplifies Multicloud Onboarding and Operation with Juniper Contrail

Hundreds of customers rely on Net One to operate and manage their cloud environments, but as the number of customers have grown, their diverse needs have put a strain on network operations. For Net One, managing multiple cloud services was becoming exponentially more difficult with each new customer. Growing complexity created challenges in building, establishing, and efficiently operating cloud services.

Setting up new customers and maintaining their cloud environments was taking too many resources. The Net One network engineering team wanted to automate processes and add an advanced cloud management platform to reduce operational workload and minimize service outages resulting from human error. “Many things need to be configured when adding a tenant, such as the platform, network, authentication, and monitoring,” says Kunitoshi Hirukawa, head of Second Applied Technology at Net One Systems Co., Ltd.’s Business Pose Development Department. “Automation is essential in order to provide the service quickly, but the costs and workloads required by our in-house development team were growing too large.”

When Net One first began offering cloud services, the network team could easily handle new customer requests. The engineers relied on a service-sharing cloud platform created with virtualization technology that assessed the networks, servers, and storage that Net One had implemented for its customers. At a certain point, manually managing the large number of customer environments became too difficult.

Adding to the problem, each platform’s network was independent, requiring the design of a separate external connection for each tenant. When extending the platform or data center, the intricate designs required rework. The service-sharing platform had many points that needed to be configured each time a tenant was added, and very little could be automated. “We wanted to introduce automation to decrease workload, reduce operational errors, and minimize service outage times,” says Hirukawa.

Using Contrail Enterprise Multicloud, Net One can create seamless end-to-end multitenant environments by separating from physical networks using overlay models and managing tenants from a centralized controller. With multicloud support, the platform can centrally manage a variety of public clouds, in addition to OpenStack and VMware.

“Contrail Enterprise Multicloud was simply the best product to automate our processes,” says Imazono. “Trying to do what Contrail Enterprise Multicloud achieves using separate products gets overly complicated. We determined that it could reduce our in-house development workload, reduce the labor required for operations, and even lead to increased service quality.”

Now that customer onboarding is automated, Net One has greatly reduced the amount of time it takes for new customers to move into their cloud-based environments. Net One also expects to see a reduction in the design work required to expand the platform in the future, and the multicloud management platform will minimize human errors that can occur during setups and configurations.

“I like the fact that Juniper Networks’ architecture is consistent, and that it allows us to effectively use shared knowledge in various areas and products,” says Aki Inoue, part of the servicesharing platform team in the Second Applied Technology Division of the Business Development Department. “Contrail Enterprise Multicloud has excellent stability, meaning we don’t have to worry in any environment, even mission-critical environments. All Juniper products are carrier-grade quality and used by telecommunications carriers, so that gives a sense of how extremely reliable they are.