Apstra has updated its flagship AOS with the ability to automate and validate Network Operating System upgrades across an entire IP fabric. The new feature, which supports multiple vendors, ensures compliance and reduction in maintenance time from weeks or months to hours or days.
Apstra said it leverages a sophisticated, extensive automated testing platform that verifies the quality of the Apstra AOS software at scale, and models the different services and payloads. The company runs fifteen million unit tests per day, covering 600+ topologies, 100+ physical devices with a variety of hardware vendors, models, and chipsets (Arista, Cisco, Juniper, Dell, Edgecore, Mellanox, Quanta, Celestica, etc) as well as virtual appliances (vEOS, NXOSv, Cumulus, OPX, Ubuntu/CentOS). Any device in the data center can be connected to any other device (physical or virtual) through the use of a reservation system and an automated programmable L1/2 patch panel, which allows Apstra to replicate and test any customer topology in its own infrastructure prior to deployment.
As an example, Apstra said a major financial services company had a single engineer working on OS upgrades, taking upwards of eight months to upgrade 174 switches. The same tasks could have been completed with AOS Maintenance Mode and Device OS Upgrade in approximately 87 hours.
The dream of fully automated networks has been with us for decades, but with the rise of machine learning and virtualized network architecture, the industry finally appears ready to step ahead with Next Gen Network Automation.
In this series of videos, we speak with the thought leaders who are redefining the concept of automation. This 4-minute overview video gives us some high-level definitions:
See our full series of Thought Leadership videos, and download the exclusive report from our partner AvidThink, at https://nginfrastructure.com/network-automation/
