Juniper leverages HTBASE acquisition to manage multi-cloud compute and storage

Juniper Networks is tapping into its HTBASE acquisition to help enterprises simplify their management of multi-cloud compute and storage resources.

Juniper bought enterprise cloud storage vendor HTBASE, which included HTBASE's multi-cloud Juke container product, for an undisclosed sum in December of last year.

In a Thursday blog post by Juniper CTO Bikash Koley, the company announced Juke  2.2, which includes integration with Kubernetes and its container storage interface (CSI), as well as new snapshot and scheduler capabilities.

RELATED: Juniper Networks buys cloud storage company HTBASE

When Juniper bought HTBASE, the company said it would fold HTBASE into its Contrail Enterprise Multi-cloud portfolio, and Thursday's news was an example of how Juniper is executing on its multi-cloud strategy.

"As Juniper Networks continues to simplify our customers’ journey to secure and automated multicloud, Juke’s storage capabilities are a natural complement to the Contrail portfolio," Koley said in the blog.

Koley said that while Juke 2.2 and Contrail can be used separately, the combination of the two enables seamless multi-cloud policy and visibility.

"Juke now unlocks multi-cloud storage, freeing applications to access data anywhere and to move between clusters," according to Koley. "Imagine providing developers an automated, latency-aware, software-defined file system that spans on-premises and cloud resources seamlessly, including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.

"It allows developers to focus on writing stateful multi-cloud applications without managing the complex storage details and variables. It also elevates the experience for infrastructure and operations teams, making storage administration easier than ever."

Juke provides storage while reducing operational complexity in DevOps through automation, according to Koley, which allows developers to focus more on application development.

With Juke, architects, administrators and site reliability engineers (SREs) can establish policies on both compute and storage resources in order to make deployments that are in-line with IT policies such as performance, proximity, cost, reliability and GDPR regulations, among others.

Improvements for Juke 2.2 include:

• Volume snapshots and clone management to boost reliability and enable mobility

• Deployment enhancements to make Juke easier to install

• Kubernetes cluster scale out with compute and storage nodes that can span clouds and sites or stay local to one cluster availability zone

New use cases enabled by the Kubernetes integration include:

• Automated multicloud resource access to match changing edge compute or proximity requirements; as users move, the workloads can change storage access behavior to follow

• Automated multicloud arbitrage for changing day and night usage patterns

• Multicloud-wide performance and/or cost optimization by moving workloads between private and public clouds depending on the cost of the resources

"Imagine an elastic multi-cloud application that expands and contracts on demand, recognizing when there is a constraint with a given cloud or region and shifting workloads to other clouds to balance," Koley said of Juke 2.2. "Now, imagine that you don’t have to rewrite your application to achieve this."

RELATED: Juniper Networks reports rocky Q1 results, but software a bright spot

Juniper's cloud vertical has been struggling over the past few quarters, and that trend continued during the company's first quarter earnings. Cloud was down 18% year over year and 6% sequentially.

In January, IBM Services said it had signed a seven-year, $325 million agreement with Juniper Networks to help Juniper better manage its IT services and give it a quicker on-ramp to a cloud-native architecture.