Juniper Targets VMware, Data Center Complexity With Contrail Insights

Juniper today unveiled Contrail Insights, a network monitoring, and analytics, troubleshooting platform that the vendor says addresses growing complexity within private cloud data centers.The latest addition to the Contrail Enterprise Multicloud suite, Juniper claims Contrail Insights will provide customers with historical and real-time visibility, thus giving them greater insight into the data center and helping them to mitigate congestion and uncover the root cause. According to James Kelly, director of product marketing at Juniper, Contrail Insights will compete against data center operations suites including VMware’s NSX, Cisco ACI, Arista CloudVision. VMware NSX and related products do some of this for the VMware stack, but critically don’t deal with the underlay,” he wrote in an email. “Other products like Cisco DCNM, Cisco ACI, or Arista CloudVision are related to [data center] networking ops, but really only ACI and NSX are close to being what we’d consider SDN.