A Software First Approach

We last met with Apstra during #NFD19 and my blog about this experience can be found here. Similar to last year, Mansour Karam (CEO and Founder) kicked off the presentation with a company update which included current and new customers, awards, and its growth which now includes over 100+ employees across the globe.

According to Apstra, the problems that exist in organizations require a combination of digital and infrastructure transformation. Key factors to consider are Business Agility, Application Reliability, and Controlling Costs that includes the right technology to support the infrastructure with automation, distributed centers of data, hybrid and multi-cloud, and multiple vendors while remaining agnostic.

 

Automation reduces costs and errors while creating greater efficiency because the distributed centers of data are close in proximity to their end users with cloud adoption while leveraging multiple vendors while remaining agnostic.

The heart of the Infrastructure Transformation is the Service Layer which abstracts and automates the infrastructure across all areas of services and this includes Multi Workload, Multi Cloud (unified layer across the various clouds), and Multi Domain.

 

Unfortunately most organizations have a tendency to build their infrastructure through hardware first and by doing so, they lock themselves into a vendor and this restricts their ability and flexibility because any decisions moving forward are tied into the software that is provided by the hardware vendor. This approach limits your ability and creates high costs with slow delivery times through business initiatives.

Apstra suggests the Software First approach because it allows the organization to define the service layer and by doing so it delivers on your needs and requirements without being locked into a hardware vendor. The goal is to choose the hardware that meets your needs based on the Software First approach.

Additionally, AOS 3.1 includes the functions listed plus NSX integration

This will conclude my first post for Apstra and I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Additional posts to come in the near future but I’ve included the names for each of the YouTube videos recorded during Apstra’s presentation and they are listed below with a hyperlink for your convenience: