Customer Success Story
Fastweb takes the fast track to scale cloud services
Fastweb, a leading telecom operator in Italy, wanted to accelerate new service deployment and improve agility for Fastcloud, its cloud solution designed for enterprises and government organizations and based on infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS), including AI, analytics, and IoT.
As demand increased for cloud services, Fastweb invested in a new operating model, Network as a Service (NaaS), to speed time to market and ensure excellent service. Not only would the company realize faster time to value, but also it could support sustainability and operational efficiency goals.
Overview
| Company | Fastweb |
| Industry | Service Provider |
| Products used | Juniper Apstra, QFX Series, MX Series, PTX Series |
| Region | EMEA |
Near-0
Time to onboard or upgrade customers with no need to purchase hardware
OpEx
Pay-as-you-grow subscription with monthly fee
Turnkey
Service eliminates challenges associated with owning, operating, and managing network infrastructure
Focus
On delivering cloud services while Juniper provides network services
Faster delivery of new services
“Our operations team was spending too much time on provisioning and updates and so we needed a new solution to speed time to market,” says Domenico Cimini, network operations and engineering manager for Fastcloud, the division within Fastweb that provides all the cloud solutions.
Fastweb designed a new private-cloud offering for SaaS, IaaS, and managed services to meet growing demand. It wanted to adopt a NaaS model, which hinged on finding a reliable provider with both network and data center expertise.
The NaaS solution needed to check a lot of boxes. Fastweb wanted the most advanced data center automation so it could automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration, updates, and capacity planning and a network solution that would help it reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions in its data centers.
Efficiency in automated and managed services
To improve efficiency in delivering operations and speed time to market, Fastweb took an innovative approach to its data center infrastructure and shifted to Juniper NaaS. A subscription-based service, Juniper NaaS delivers best-in-class platform capabilities with no upfront capex investment.
Fastweb launched the new managed services model at two data centers, with plans to refresh and shift its data centers globally. As the data centers are refreshed, the network IP fabric, comprised of Juniper QFX5120 switches, is upgraded to a spine-leaf architecture with a fabric mesh, enabling greater agility and scale to deliver cloud services. Juniper Apstra intent-based networking software is used to design, automate, and continuously validate the operations of the network fabric.
Juniper MX304 routers and Juniper PTX10001 routers interconnect its global data centers, which were chosen for their flexible logical scale and superior throughput efficiency packed into compact form factors. Another major advantage is an onsite Juniper Resident Engineer, who knows all the ins and outs of Juniper data center network interconnect and automation.”
Creating a blueprint for data center success
Relying on Juniper NaaS means no capital expenses while supporting the company’s sustainability goals at the same time.
With Apstra, Juniper and Fastweb can automate infrastructure provisioning and speed cloud service delivery. After deployment, Apstra continues to validate that all is well in the network and sends proactive monitoring alerts about possible performance issues that could impact the customer experience.
“As a cloud service provider, we do configurations for hundreds of customers,” explains Cimini. “The combination of Apstra and an expert Juniper Resident Engineer who knows our network means we can deliver these new services with confidence.”
The Products
Juniper Apstra
Intent-based networking software automates the entire network life cycle—from design through everyday operations—across multivendor data centers with continuous validation, powerful analytics, and root cause identification to assure reliability.
QFX5120
The QFX5120 line offers 1/10/25/40/100GbE switches designed for data center, data center edge, data center interconnect and campus deployments with requirements for low-latency Layer 2/Layer 3 features and advanced EVPN-VXLAN capabilities.
MX304
The MX304 Universal Routing Platform delivers massive scale and efficiency for space- and power-constrained environments. It is a carrier-grade, multiservice platform with extensive automation capabilities enabling operators to meet constantly expanding bandwidth, subscriber, and service demands. The MX304 Universal Routing Platform delivers 4.8 Tbps of system capacity in a 2 RU unit and supports 96 x 10 or 25 GbE, 48 x 40, 50, or 100 GbE, or 12 x 400 GbE interfaces in a single chassis.
PTX10001-36MR
The PTX10001-36MR is a high-capacity, space- and power-optimized routing and switching platform. It delivers 9.6 Tbps of throughput and 10.8 Tbps of I/O capacity in a 1 U, fixed form factor. Based on the Juniper Express 4 ASIC, the platform provides dense 100GbE and 400GbE connectivity for highly scalable routing and switching in cloud, service provider, and enterprise networks and data centers.
Published November 2023