Techno-Economic Analysis for Automating Your Data Center with Apstra

0:02 hello everyone and thank you for attending today's webinar techno economic analysis for automating your

0:08 data center with abstra sponsored by Juniper Networks before we begin I wanted to cover a few

0:15 housekeeping items on the right hand side of your screen is the Q a if you have any questions during the webcast

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1:03 using the same audience link that was sent to you earlier today I would now like to turn the event over to Light

1:09 reading analyst Terry Sweeney thank you Anna Kate and let me add my

1:16 welcome to this conversation about what you get for what you spend in the data center

1:21 I'm Terry Sweeney contributing Editor to Light reading and I'll be moderating today's discussion

1:27 um as you already know we're doing a deep dive today into Juniper's abstra platform with discussion about how the

1:34 data center must transform to accommodate unprecedented demand and bandwidth

1:40 you'll hear more about an independent study examining the economics and Roi of

1:45 data center Hardware We'll be asking you to respond to a couple of polls and as Anna Kate

1:51 mentioned we're reserving time at the end of the presentation to answer your questions so please use that q a box so

1:57 we get all your questions answered our presenters today include T formula

2:03 uh consultant with Forester research as well as Arun Gandhi senior manager of

2:09 product marketing at Juniper Networks uh but before we hear from them

2:15 uh let's uh go to the the first poll

2:22 um we wanted to get an idea from our audience uh which of these statements

2:28 best describes your own data center footprint strategy so uh go ahead and

2:34 click on one of those if you would we'll give you just a a 30 or 40 seconds here

2:40 to to consider these we're adding new traditional data center sites and

2:45 capacity we're reducing slash consolidating our traditional data center sites we have no

2:52 plans to change the number of our data center sites but are modernizing existing ones

2:57 finally no change to our data center footprint it's business as usual

3:05 Arun Gandhi if you are a betting man any any predictions as to how our audience

3:11 may go with this I would certainly go with the top uh one

3:18 or two you know that would be my position but let's see what the audience has to say all right let's uh let's

3:24 click over to that

3:29 um Aruna looks like you would be well rewarded for your bet

3:35 um the adding new traditional data center sites and capacity is indeed our top answer

3:41 um that's that that's curious um

3:47 with that in mind um Aaron maybe you can get us going with

3:53 talking a bit about why Juniper commissioned this study in the first place

3:59 Teddy thanks for the question and it's great to be on this panel with you and T

4:05 as you know netbooks are foundational to everything we do today kind of increase

4:11 in size beyond anything we have seen before data center networking has become

4:17 more complex in the last few years and this added complexity needs to be managed and as you know well the tools

4:23 we've used you know so far to manage them no longer apply so the past was all

4:30 about bending the infrastructure to the needs of the individual applications but the future is all about building solid

4:37 infrastructure and using the architecture as the foundation and then building applications around it this

4:45 means doing the same thing the same way every time without fail so that your

4:50 infrastructure can be same and the operations can be uniform and truly if

4:55 you see the desire at the core is to simplify operations add Juniper the bet we made is on

5:03 reliability by focusing on the intent based networking at a data center level

5:08 that reliability would be the key to operations going forward and with data

5:15 centers being uh decidedly multi-vendor and again oriented around software

5:20 defined operations uh so Juniper as you know a quiet abstra uh the leader in data center Network

5:27 Management in last year in 2021 January and after was one of the first companies

5:34 to identify that uh operating the data center network was a key design factor

5:40 and I want to impress on the fact that abstra is the only multi-invented DC

5:47 automation solution in the market today and that was a design goal from day one

5:52 and as Juniper we're actually committed to that so now to answer a question

5:57 Terry uh what we've seen is a great traction for abstra from our customers

6:02 across all segments you know you talk about their Enterprises service providers or Cloud providers and all

6:10 geographies as well so through this independent research our goal was to learn about the tangible

6:17 benefits our customers are experiencing with abstra and the results as you will hear from t t are absolutely astounding

6:27 great stuff Arun uh before we go there with t um let's let's maybe grab a little more

6:34 context from our audience with our our second and final poll where we're asking

6:39 our audience about what's the biggest pain point in your data center um insufficient levels of automation

6:45 can't activate new services and features quickly enough supporting multiple vendors is

6:52 challenging budgets seem to run out before the quarter does or or

6:58 um other I I guess we uh could have also put a all of the above here but uh

7:03 um T from Forester research can can we bring you into the the mix here and just

7:10 to talk a little bit about um maybe your own ideas about where the the

7:15 biggest pain Point may be for our audience what's what's your sense of this tea

7:21 oh Derry my my answer is going to be a little skewed because I did the

7:26 interview and this uh the customers the four customers we talked to kind of gave me an idea of what their concerns were

7:33 so I don't know if the other people on The Forum will be having similar issues we've got an inside track then yeah so

7:41 as of right now and I'm thinking most of what they told us was being able to manage multiple uh multi-vendor devices

7:49 within their networks as well as the automation some also talked about configuration

7:54 consistency and stuff like that so let's see what you know people yeah let's see what the results are

8:03 um the the multi-vendor issue is is challenging um T does that match up with the the

8:10 findings from your research yes that was one of the main things that uh all of the customers talk to us about

8:17 they pointed that out as a big value going to abstract the the ability to activate new features

8:24 quickly enough is uh is is right behind that that multi-vendor issue so

8:31 um thank you from our audience thank you for uh weighing in there um

8:37 T can we hear more from you um I'm wondering if you can get us started with some discussion about forester's

8:44 methodology for this total economic impact research that you performed can can you tell us more there

8:54 thank you very much Terry um again everyone good morning and welcome to this webinar my name is tifam

9:01 Lu and I'm a consultant on the forest total economic impact team

9:06 so everything I present today uh and the answers I give would you during this

9:12 webinar will be an Abridged you know version of the full study that we did which is a Forester study economic

9:18 impact of juniper abstract more detailed disclosures are included in the full studies so

9:25 please find the entire study and you'll get everything that we got from these customers

9:33 so Forester research has shown that uh over 90 percent of I.T decision makers

9:38 find Value in business case so the Forester model goes beyond just a

9:44 total cost of ownership or return on investment models common in the industry

9:50 we add risk and flexibility into our models so that we can have a

9:55 comprehensive view of an I.T business decision

10:02 so to answer your question in a little more detail Terry you know TI is a methodology that we use at Forester to

10:09 articulate and justify the value of our technology totally economic impact consists of four

10:15 components so we do look at the benefits that the added value business benefit to

10:22 an organization experiences we look at costs these are essentially The Upfront and

10:29 ongoing costs of adopting that technology in this case you know uh abstra we look at flexibility

10:36 yeah at Forester we we uh we Define flexibility

10:42 as a what helps to incorporate the Strategic value of future Investments enabled by

10:48 the original investment so now that you've invested in abstra what other possibilities can your organization find

10:55 going forward then of course we add risk which uh across all three variables I just

11:01 mentioned we are just for riskiness and uncertainty of an investment so everybody will not be able to have the

11:07 same benefits as each other that's why we put risk into our methodology

11:13 so what we basically did for abstra was we took a multi-step approach first we

11:21 spoke to forrester's internal experts who have you know versed in this industry then we talked to Juniper's subject

11:27 matter experts to learn more about the value proposition of abstra next we interviewed four Juniper

11:33 customers who have been utilizing the solution for at least one year

11:38 from those interviews we developed a financial model and then

11:44 wrote up the case study which is available on Juniper's website again we

11:49 encourage everybody to go down the downloaded look at the entire study then see how you know they can adapt it to

11:56 their unique situation

12:01 so I think that gives a general overview then theory of you know what we did for

12:06 just being able to bring this study together

12:12 walk us through some of the other key findings from the research that you did with customers

12:19 okay uh before I actually go into that theory uh as you can see here uh we did

12:24 talk to customers from you know very diverse Industries right we we talked to people in uh energy we talked to

12:31 somebody who was in insurance and risk Consulting and so very diverse pool of

12:37 customers that we did talk to and one of them actually told us that

12:44 you know uh as you can see this slide captures the sentiment of most of the customers we

12:49 interviewed this is what a data center architect at an energy company told us

12:56 most talked about the cost of you know Time Savings as shaded with operation tasks they also like the configuration

13:02 standardization like I told you from that beginning question on there so this is some of the things that we actually

13:07 heard them say so when it comes to results we actually found that you know in after our

13:14 financial analysis that uh we got about 320 return on investment

13:22 benefits of 925 000 and a net present value of 725 000 over three years

13:36 to go into a little more detail on exactly how this benefits that show up you know let's start up with uh you know

13:44 after onboarding abstract the Quantified benefits observed from this investment fell into four pillars

13:50 so we had design and planning cost savings deployment cost savings

13:57 data center operations cost savings and tools replacement cost savings

14:03 let's pick in a little more detail about each of them

14:09 interviews said that uh abstra helped reduce the number of FTE hours used for

14:15 Preparation design tasks they use abstra they said abstract is a templatized and

14:22 employees just selected options thereby saving lots of time the composite organization in this case

14:29 that we started uh witnessed seventy three thousand dollars in present value savings over three

14:35 years the next benefit they talked about as well

14:41 was a day one deployment cost savings they said with abstra

14:48 configuring is done centrally in the you know interface and they push out to the

14:54 researches this along with less focus on cable ordering also saved FTE hours in the

15:02 deployment stage of a data center this study discovered that a composite

15:07 organization saved over 72 000 dollars over three years as well

15:15 the next benefit we also saw Terry was a operations cost savings

15:23 interviewers told us that abstra made it possible to delegate work

15:29 originally done by senior level Engineers to junior level technicians

15:34 the abstract solution supports multiple vendor environments and reduce the need for vendors Specialists so you know they

15:43 gave us the examples of in the past each vendor that they worked with they had to hire a specialist to actually come work

15:49 on the devices for that particular for that particular vendor to model this particular benefit

15:56 Forrester calculated the difference in costs between senior level engineers and lower level technicians in an abstract

16:02 environment Forester adjusted this benefit down by a risk factor of 15 percent

16:09 we we did that risk because we recognized that uh like the diversity of operation engineer skills

16:16 set within organizations data center complexity

16:21 configuration consistency on devices within data centers and other things like that you know

16:27 this can make the benefit you know relative to different companies so the

16:33 composite organization realized a three-year present value of 448 000 just from you know day two plus

16:40 savings and the final benefit that you know we were able to quantify for this study

16:49 was in two's replacement interviewees told Forrester that uh they

16:54 replaced an average of two Legacy tools when they switch to abstra

17:00 they said abstra Hub with automation configuration consistency and has an

17:05 ability to keep the network up and running replacing Legacy tools showed present

17:12 value Savings of you know 358 000 over three years

17:18 Terry I hope this answers your question and more details can be found from reading the full study push uh you know

17:25 post that on Juniper's website again that will be where I always refrain more detail down there

17:30 thanks T I'm I'm imagining there also were some unquantifiable benefits that

17:36 that you came across can you talk about other benefits maybe that customers identified in data center management

17:44 yeah thank you very much Terry for for bringing that up because uh even though I talked about these four benefits these

17:50 were the ones that the customers could actually put numbers to them when they talked to us but they did give us a

17:56 whole bunch of other things that at that moment they couldn't quantify we did not have you know all the time to go through

18:03 looking in every detail but each of them said there were some extra benefits here and some of the examples that they gave

18:09 us was you know scalability of data center networks you know interviewers told for us that

18:15 abstract made it easier to add or reduce parts so this makes it easier and

18:20 cheaper to scale data centers you know up and down depending on how you actually want to scale them

18:26 the second one they mentioned was a they also talked about that multivendor

18:31 device management capability right so we've mentioned that a couple of times they didn't quite quantify that but

18:37 there's like lots of savings actually the fact that they could manage various you know vendors within the same

18:43 framework as long as uh you know they have that backbone of abstra managing everything

18:49 then they talked about configuration consistency one of the things we actually heard here

18:54 you know with customers who were you know Global said you know you go to their different data centers in

19:00 different continents the configuration is different so actually being able to show consistency was difficult but with

19:07 abstra it's very possible for them to you know you build a configuration in the central abstract unit you can push

19:14 it out to all the devices wherever they are in the world and there's that consistency making it easier to manage

19:20 their data centers one other thing they also mentioned which was important to them was you know

19:27 operating system management and upgrading right so in the past like the

19:32 tours they will have to go into individual devices to update their operation systems in the but now with

19:38 abstra you know only a few could be done at the time and

19:44 in bid networks it took weeks or more to upgrade device operating systems this

19:49 always cause problems like downtime or other connectivity issues so with abstra

19:54 all devices can be identified and the operating system update pushed out at

20:00 once this is faster efficient and more accurate since abstra does validation

20:06 automatically to tell if the configuration is going to work with that device version or not so you know right

20:12 up front if I walk away I'm doing something else this is going to work or if rather than spending a few hours come

20:18 back and there's you know the default order so once more again Terry I will sing my

20:24 old song go to the old story to the whole study and you'll see even more detail back in each of these you know

20:30 things that we talked about here great stuff T thanks for walking us through both the direct and indirect

20:36 benefits um of this data center platform um Arun Gandhi of juniper um this is

20:44 going to be gratifying to hear um tell us more about what your reaction was when you you saw these results

20:53 well uh thanks t for sharing all the interesting data because it's always it

20:58 always gets me excited listening to uh listen to the real customers and what they have seen but obviously we were

21:05 very excited to hear these results uh Terry and I'm sure you'll agree with me that these results uh prove one more

21:12 time that we stand way above competitive products in the market as well uh we

21:17 we've been hearing plenty of anecdotal comments from our customers in several forums and their initial excitement once

21:26 they've started to use and explore abstra but achieving a 320 Roi and is

21:32 less than a six months of payback time is simply fantastic and not to miss uh there are several

21:41 additional benefits that we uncovered in his research that the customers were not even able to quantify them so I think we

21:48 just excited just jazzed up about these results uh and thanks to Forrester for going above and beyond here

21:57 um looks like we've got ways for our our viewers to uh download or access the

22:03 report and anything more that you want to say about those so Teddy the report is available of

22:09 course as he mentioned it's it's there on the slide as well uh please download it you can also reach out to and by the

22:16 way we'll be sending this the report as well as the webinar recording after the uh after the webinar and also you can

22:24 reach out to your account team for for the report we also provide you with a business analysis tool for TCO analysis

22:31 customized to your environment and I would suggest reaching out to your

22:36 account manager or abstra sales at juniper.net for more details

22:44 thanks for that that's uh that's helpful we're going to leave this up uh while we go into the the Q a so uh those who want

22:53 to access it can have sufficient time to do that um before we dive in on the question and

22:59 answer part of the event just want to remind our audience members uh that to participate in the Q a you'll just type

23:06 your question into the text box located to the right of the presentation window um just click that q a icon at the

23:13 bottom of your screen super intuitive um this is also a good time to introduce

23:19 Emmeline Wong as a senior product marketing manager from juniper abstra who will be joining us for the Q a

23:26 section as well welcome Emmeline um

23:32 Tia I'm going to toss the first question to you um there there's a phrase that popped up

23:37 in your research and possibly in your comments help us unpack the definition of this term composite organization what

23:44 what is that oh thank you very much Terry um within

23:50 Forester what we try to do with these studies is that uh we just don't go to one company and hear what they say right

23:56 and then we come out into the wall and say that is what it is so we actually go

24:01 out and we interview more than one customer in this case uh like we showed you during the presentation we talked to

24:07 four customers and those customers were very diverse you know energy companies insurance and finance companies and all

24:14 across the board and these companies too were varied in sizes of their data

24:19 centers right so I think one of them had like a 14 data centers in production and

24:26 another one had about six so they were varied as well so what we do at Foresters we now it's bad at bad science

24:33 we we take all of those uh feedback that we have from all of those companies and

24:39 from one composite organization that's where we come with that and then we look through and we build a financial model

24:45 saying you know so I really don't want to use average because it's not completely average but

24:52 we we play for all kinds of different factors to actually make sure that when we come out to the marketplace we're

24:57 saying these are the benefits customers are saying they are seeing from using abstra we we have double checked our

25:04 work and that's where that composite organization comes from thank you for that

25:10 um Arun turning back to you um let's let's talk scale how how much does the abstra solution scale

25:18 um give us an idea there sure that's a great question so so Teddy

25:25 uh scale has got two directions right small and large here and the absolute

25:31 solution was the built ground up for scale so in fact our first customer was

25:37 Yahoo Japan that deployed an early release of abstra across the data

25:42 centers with hundreds of switches and it now scales a thousand and in some cases tens of thousands so as you see we build

25:50 the architecture from the beginning to fit the largest data centers so that we

25:56 can scale with the customers and as they grow their deployments so that's from the uh from the large

26:02 customers deployments and then on the other hand we have the the smallest deployment that we support what we call

26:08 the collapse spine which is essentially one spine connected to two leads

26:17 very good um thanks for that everyone um we've got another question here about

26:23 how data centers should evolve to enable 5G

26:29 um which I'm I'm happy to take a swing at um from from where I said it it's clear

26:35 that data centers are preparing for the biggest exponential step up uh in

26:41 available bandwidth um since the the big fiber gains of uh the late 90s early 2000s um and

26:50 um 5G is only going to accelerate the the bandwidth Bonanza that that comes

26:56 flooding across these platforms um server connections are uh going from 50

27:01 gigabits per Lane to 100 gigabits switching bandwidth uh 256 terabit per

27:09 second um those 800 gigabit plugable modules that may have seemed like Overkill just

27:14 a few years ago are poised to become standard so in tandem with all this

27:20 analysts are already seeing more Enterprise content originating from The

27:26 Edge um some predict that by 2025 75 of work content will come from The Edge Network

27:33 which uh is up 10 from just a few years ago in 2018 so

27:39 data like the workforce is is getting more distributed which means the data

27:44 center has to be ready for this again this torrent of Mega data that that 5G

27:50 will accelerate and and also transport back to the data center for

27:55 storage analysis and and processing um so in that vein platforms like abstra

28:02 will will help provide the the capacity the management and the intelligence

28:08 for the both the data center and the edge architectures that servers providers choose to deploy

28:18 a question here about how abstra supports Brownfield deployment would you

28:24 like to address that sure I'll take it I'll take that take that the question often asked uh

28:32 short answer is yes and uh customers can absolutely use app store to automate

28:39 their existing data center Fabric and in fact they'll gain major benefits when they're too again I'd suggest reaching

28:47 out to your account manager or apps for sales at Jennifer and then you can get more details about you know how to

28:54 migrator data center current data center to App Store

28:59 very good uh T turning back to you um is is the abstra model that Forester created

29:06 um going to be made publicly available say on the website

29:15 T if you're talking we can't hear you uh I'm I'm assuming that they are

29:23 talking about the financial model that will build the benefits out of would that be right I believe so yes yeah so the model

29:31 itself no would not be available on the website but the study is what is available on the website for people to

29:38 look into the way we write these studies is we kind of explain to some level how

29:43 we went about the process of putting this together so somebody who reached to the model may be able to in

29:49 collaboration with a the TCO you know analysis through Juniper be able to

29:55 figure out a way of you know determining how this will benefit them but the short answer is that model

30:02 itself is proprietary it will not be on the website sorry thanks for that um any any additional

30:08 light you can shed on the the benefits of of app store was there other things that maybe didn't fit maybe so neatly in

30:15 the categories that you had uh I don't one of the the things with

30:24 with us yet at Forest uh Terry was like the unquantified benefits that I told

30:29 you about it you know we have to deal with time and being able to you know um

30:34 talk to the right people in deep into the organization to actually bring numbers from those but I think

30:41 there's a lot of benefit in those because each of them actually told us you know if you actually look at the

30:47 consistency of you know being able to have configuration consistency it's worth something it's just so happened

30:53 that within this study and the time frame we had we could not dig into all of that so

30:58 just look at those unquantified benefits and you know within each environment you can see how much benefit they can be out

31:06 of those so I think this the return for this can be even a little bigger than

31:11 what we presented if we were able to quantify more of these things thanks T

31:16 um around turning back to you excuse me um does abstra support three-stage and

31:22 five-stage evpn vxlan reference designs only what can you tell us there

31:29 sure um uh with the new release actually with

31:34 4.1.1 abstract can support all reference designs all their data center reference

31:40 designs and obviously previously the App Store was opinionated opinionated and we

31:46 we could only support three and five stage and evpn and collapse fabric but with 4.1 4.1.1 it's all uh any any

31:55 different designs will be supported please look out for a launch happening on September 15th and if you are an

32:01 existing customer of juniper you can get an early release in your hands and

32:07 experience the cutting it features coming in 4.1.1 and once again the release date is September 15th please

32:13 look out thanks for that um and with that we uh we are bumping up

32:19 against our time that's uh that's all the time we have for questions today um my sincerest thanks to both Arun

32:26 Gandhi of juniper and T formula from Forrester research Light reading appreciates your time and

32:32 expertise on data center economics and and how well build to to manage the mega

32:38 bandwidth uh Evolution coming our way thank you as well to our sponsor Juniper

32:45 as well as do everyone in the audience we appreciate you joining us for this light reading webinar techno economic

32:51 analysis for automating your data center with abstra again thank you for your attention and

32:57 participation see you again soon Teddy thanks for orchestrating it thank

33:03 you thanks Steve for all the analysis and the report appreciate it yeah I appreciate you guys having us it was a

33:10 great ride so thank you very much and we hope you know we presented the the study

33:15 as best as we can again everybody who's on the you know on the webinar just go

33:20 on the website look at at it in more detail there's way more in there than what we could have covered in 30 minutes

33:27 thank you totally totally into a spot on thank you thanks Terry thanks everybody