Artificial intelligence is transforming network operations, with companies increasingly focusing on AI-native networking to enhance data center connectivity.

This shift is driving innovations that streamline AI workloads, helping businesses boost performance and reduce operational costs, according to Praveen Jain (pictured, right), senior vice president and general manager of AI clusters and cloud ready data center at Juniper Networks Inc.

Juniper Networks AE Natarajan and Praveen Jain talk to theCUBE about AI-native networking.

“Today, we are coining another term called “Ops for AI,” which consists of intent-based networking, AI-optimized ethernet, as well as AI ops,” Jain said. “This is AI ops now applied to networking for AI. Ultimately, what we want to achieve [is] the best utilization from the network, the best performance from the network, at the same time with ease of management.”

Jain and AE Natarajan (left), executive vice president and chief development Officer of Juniper Networks, spoke with theCUBE Research’s John Furrier and Bob Laliberte at the Seize the AI Moment event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed AI-native networking and innovations in data center connectivity, focusing on how AI is integrated into network infrastructure to optimize performance and scalability. (* Disclosure below.)

Scaling AI-native networking for optimized data center connectivity

Another major focus is ensuring that the growing demand for AI processing power is met with adequate networking capabilities. As AI clusters expand in size and complexity, companies face challenges in connecting these systems across data centers, Natarajan explained.

“I’m very excited to talk about this because here at Juniper, we build our products with our own silicon and with commodity silicon, which gives us the flexibility to customize our products that can be form fit for every variation that we can think about,” he said. “Your GPU clusters are getting bigger and you have to interconnect them now because of whether it’s power, thermal or space capacity, whatever reasons you have to go past one building or one data center and interconnect the … We have some exciting products that actually cater to the data center interconnect, which is our PTX portfolio of products.”

Security is a top priority as AI models and data grow more valuable. Customers prioritize protecting their data and intellectual property, hosting AI model training in secure environments, Natarajan stressed.

“We, here at Juniper, have a way by which we build a ubiquitous security control plane,” he said. “What it does is it doesn’t matter whether you use Juniper’s security products, which is the SRX products, either virtual or physical products. You have a unified control plane from which you dictate the security policies.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Seize the AI Moment event:

Here’s the complete event video playlist:

(* Disclosure: Juniper Networks Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Juniper Networks nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE