Some network services require specific functions be handled on-premises, due to bandwidth, latency, or architecture requirements. Juniper Mist Edge extends select microservices to the customer premises while using the Juniper Mist cloud and its distributed software architecture for scalable and resilient operations, management, troubleshooting, and analytics.

For large campus networks, Juniper Mist Edge provides data plane centralization and seamless roaming through on-premises tunnel termination of traffic to and from access points, while keeping all the control and management functions in the Juniper Mist cloud.

Juniper Mist Edge extends VLANs to distributed branches and telecommuters, replacing remote VPN technology, and it provides dynamic traffic segmentation for IoT devices. Split tunneling enables separation of guest access and corporate traffic.

The Juniper Mist Edge architecture offers several key benefits:

• Agility to develop and deploy new microservices rapidly
• Scalable platform to meet demands of small and large campuses
• Deployment and management simplicity
• Stateless architecture for quick failover
• Service upgrades within seconds
• Decoupled service deployment from AP firmware
• Zero-touch configuration and cloud management

Juniper Mist Edge is deployed as a standalone appliance with multiple variants for different size deployments. A software-only virtual machine (VM) solution will be available in the near future for added design flexibility.

This service lets you make a seamless transition, moving from an existing centralized data plane with legacy controller architectures to the modern Juniper Mist microservices cloud, without impacting network design.

The access points use standards-based L2TPv3 technology or IPsec in a teleworker scenario to tunnel traffic to and from the Juniper Mist Edge for selected WLANs. This provides the network design flexibility to use a combination of distributed and centralized data planes, where needed, to meet customer requirements. A deployment with Juniper Mist Edge can support locally bridged and tunneled WLANs.

The service enables you to preserve the VLAN configuration at your edge switches while transitioning to a Mist microservices cloud architecture. You accomplish this by tunneling your traffic through a centralized cluster of Juniper Mist Edge devices while maintaining the ability to separate SSIDs and users onto different VLANs.

The service also supports seamless mobility for devices running latency-sensitive applications, allowing them to maintain performance as they roam across the campus. A Juniper Mist Edge cluster will operate intelligently to deliver scalable and reliable performance by optimizing broadcast and multicast traffic delivery.

Configuration of the tunnels is also simplified through the power of the Juniper Mist cloud and its zero-touch provisioning capabilities.

Many times, Wi-Fi deployments have the requirement to bridge the WLAN locally as well as support a separate overlay for guest access and the corporate wireless network traffic. The Juniper Mist microservices architecture provides the flexibility to form multiple tunnels to different Juniper Mist Edge appliances based on the wireless configuration requirements. For instance, one site of the WLAN could be bridged locally, a guest WLAN could be tunneled to the DMZ (Juniper Mist Edge), while the corporate SSID is tunneled to the data center (Juniper Mist Edge) for access to corporate resources.

Juniper Mist Edge supports an elastically scalable cluster (with options for backup clusters) composed of an unlimited number of nodes within a cluster. The Juniper Mist Edge cluster design for the tunneling microservice is guided by the aggregate capacity considerations based on number of access points, number of clients, and throughput expectations.

Active/active tunneling clusters deliver higher availability and resiliency than traditional N+1 standby architectures and ensure redundancy while balancing the AP between Mist Edges with zero idle capacity. Mist Edge supports multiple layers of redundancy to ensure WLAN survivability in the event of a catastrophic network failure. Multiple Mist Edge nodes within a cluster allow APs to associate to any surviving node in the event of a failure. If an entire cluster goes off-line within a data center, Mist APs can fail-over to a different cluster hosted in a different data center to assure network survivability. 

Additionally, Mist Edge architecture flexibility allows for the standby cluster for one site to be the Primary cluster for another site, to fully utilize the resources and reduce operating cost.

Juniper Access Points separate the control and management functions from the data plane and will continue to function even if the connection to the Mist Edge goes down.

To assess whether the Juniper Mist Edge is a fit for your AI-driven enterprise, please contact your local Juniper partner or representative who can help you architect your next-generation network.

For information on warranty, refer to - https://support.juniper.net/sites/support/pdf/warranty/juniper-mist-wifi-warranty.pdf

At Juniper Networks, we are dedicated to dramatically simplifying network operations and driving superior experiences for end users. Our solutions deliver industry-leading insight, automation, security and AI to drive real business results. We believe that powering connections will bring us closer together while empowering us all to solve the world’s greatest challenges of well-being, sustainability and equality.

1000749 - 004 - EN JULY 2023