Juniper Networks Offers Industry’s First Ops4AI Lab to Maximize AI Workload Performance

Juniper Networks, a leader in secure, AI-native networking, is launching a comprehensive multivendor lab for validating end-to-end automated AI Data Center solutions and automated operations with switching, routing, storage and compute solutions from leading vendors. Additionally, Juniper Networks is introducing new Juniper Validated Designs (JVDs) that accelerate the time-to-value in deploying AI clusters.

Juniper is releasing new key software enhancements that optimize the performance and management of AI workloads over Ethernet. Through these Operations for AI—Ops4AI—initiatives, Juniper is collaborating closely with a broad range of infrastructure ecosystem partners to enable the best AI workload performance via the most flexible and easiest-to-manage data center infrastructures.

As a key element of Juniper’s AI-Native Networking Platform, the existing Networking for AI solution consists of a spine-leaf data center architecture with a foundation of AI-optimized 400G and 800G QFX Series Switches and PTX Series Routers.

The solution is secured via high performance firewalls with industry-leading effectiveness, and managed via Juniper Apstra data center assurance software and the Marvis Virtual Network Assistant (VNA).

Juniper Apstra and Marvis provide key Ops4AI capabilities, such as intent-based networking, multivendor switch management, application / flow / workload awareness, AIOps proactive actions, and a GenAI conversational interface.

With Juniper’s full Networking for AI solution, customers and partners can lower AI training Job Completion Times (JCTs), reduce latency during inferencing, and increase GPU utilization while decreasing deployment times.

To simplify AI clusters and maximize network performance even further, Juniper has added new Ops4AI software enhancements that together offer unique value for customers.

The enhancements being announced include:

• Fabric autotuning for AI: Telemetry from routers and switches are used to automatically calculate and configure optimal parameter settings for congestion control in the fabric using closed-loop automation capability in Juniper Apstra to deliver peak AI workload performance.
• Global load-balancing : An end-to-end view of congestion hotspots in the network (i.e. local and downstream switches) is used to load-balance AI traffic in real-time, delivering lower latency, better network utilization and reduced JCTs.
• End-to-end visibility from network to SmartNICs: Provides an end-to-end holistic view of the network, including SmartNICs from NVIDIA (BlueField and ConnectX), and others.

The Ops4AI Lab, located at Juniper’s Sunnyvale, California corporate headquarters, is open for all qualified customers and partners who want to test their own AI workloads using the most advanced GPU compute, storage technologies, Ethernet-based networking fabrics and automated operations. Ops4AI Lab testing using validated Ethernet fabrics delivers comparable performance to InfiniBand-based AI infrastructure.

Users requesting a slot in the Juniper Ops4AI Lab should contact their local Juniper Networks sales team.

According to the company, Juniper Validated Designs are detailed implementation documents that give new customers confidence that the solution and topology they have chosen is well characterized, well tested and repeatable, resulting in faster time to successful deployment.

"Best-of-breed always wins out, and the same will be true for compute, storage, networking, and operations in AI data centers. Juniper has made a significant investment in the Ops4AI Lab, JVDs, and a new promotional program to enable our customers and partners to have maximum choice, flexibility, and stability in how they build a complete GenAI solution,” said Praveen Jain, SVP and GM of AI and data center at Juniper Networks. “There has never been a better time to build high-performance, low-latency, multivendor AI Data Center solutions that are simple, fast and economical to deploy and operate."

For more information about this news, visit www.juniper.net.