Apstra CEO On New ‘Sophisticated’ VMware vSphere Integration

Apstra CEO Mansour Karam talks to CRN about the company’s new Apstra Operating System (AOS) 3.0 which includes tight integration with VMware vSphere.

Intent-based networking pioneer Apstra is taking its flagship operating system to the next level with new group-based policy automation and advanced VMware vSphere integration.

“It’s a very exciting release for us. It’s in fact, our biggest release to date,” said Apstra founder and CEO Mansour Karam in a recent interview with CRN.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup, which was featured on CRN’s 2019 Data Center 50 list, recently launched version 3.0 of its Apstra Operating System (AOS). AOS 3.0 automates data center operations across the network regardless of a customers’ vendor mix.

The new AOS 3.0 extends existing VMware vSphere capabilities to support automatic remediation of network anomalies. The company’s intent-based analytics constantly check the network to ensure that network configuration between the Apstra managed environment and the vSphere servers are in sync.

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“We now have a sophisticated integration with vSphere,” said Karam. “As part of this integration we now have the ability to have a deep understanding of the workloads and correlate infrastructure performance with workload performance. And if we see any problems – whether they are connectivity problems or performance problems – we have the ability to auto-remediate.”

Pere Monclus, chief technology officer for networking and security at VMware, said innovative software-defined networking must span all infrastructure and environments while delivering new levels of automation, programmability and security.

“VMware and Apstra are working together to help enable customers to re-imagine what the data center network looks like and how it operates, and take full advantage of this new era of networking to support their digital transformation initiatives,” said Monclus in a statement.

Another key feature inside AOS 3.0 is its Multidomain Unified Group-Based Policy, which unifies disparate data centers around policy, allowing for automated policy enforcement regardless of the location or vendor products. Apstra’s new group-based policy provides a simple user interface and API that delivers end-to-end policy deployments automatically without requiring the user to know where the policy needs to be implemented.

“[This] means that now customers can use AOS to define and enforce their security compliance policies. We’re doing it in a multi-domain manner, meaning that it’s applicable to one data center or multiple data centers. It’s applicable in the private cloud but also in a hybrid cloud. So it enables the customers to not only be multi-vendor, but also multi-cloud,” said Karam.

Karam said AOS 3.0 enables businesses to build an intent-based data center that increases application reliability and availability while also simplifying deployments and operations through automation.

“We’re still the only intent-based networking solution out there that was built from the ground up to deliver Level 3 automation,” said Karam.