Advania Iceland automates data center network operations with Apstra

As digitalization moves forward faster than ever, Advania, one of Iceland’s largest managed service providers, has grown rapidly.

With the intent to reimagine data center operations to meet the digital needs of business and government clients, Advania chose the Juniper Apstra system for the continuous automation and assurance of its data center fabric. 

Overview


Company Advania
Industry Service Provider
Products used Juniper Apstra
Region EMEA
Advania Image
Customer Success At-a-glance

Faster

Data center fabric deployment

Extend

Fabric across data centers 

320

Customers in Iceland 

20%

Growth over the last five years 

Challenge

Scaling IT services to meet growing demand

With a focus on helping clients use technology to create value for their end customers, Advania offers managed IT services in local and cross-Nordic markets, including Sweden, Iceland, and Norway. With growing demand for sustainable IT services, Advania wanted to scale and automate its data center operations.

“Our main goal was to automate our data center as much as possible,” says Darko Petrovic, principal engineer at Advania Iceland. “We wanted to reduce time spent on provisioning, operational friction, and human errors.” 

Advania Iceland Challenge
Solution

Scale data center operations reliably across vendors

Apstra provided Advania with a new way of thinking about data center network operations. Apstra is a software-only intent-based networking solution that uses closed-loop automation and assurance along with multivendor support to provide a complete fabric management solution.

“Apstra is easy and effortless” says Petrovic.

Intent-based network design and operations allow the Advania network engineering team to specify the outcomes it wants, and then the Apstra software sets up the fabric and assures that it runs as intended—even across multiple data centers. 

“When compared to other solutions, Apstra’s level of automation, provisioning and visibility offers far more capability,” says Petrovic. “Apstra helps us build and maintain a reliable network by ensuring that the operational state of the network is always running as intended. The simplicity of the tool allowed us to achieve excellent time-to-value because the tool was easy to learn and implement.” 

Advania Iceland Solution
Outcome

Simplified fabric management across data centers

With intent-based network design and operations, Advania can deploy network services faster, more quickly resolve problems, and use IT resources more efficiently as it meets growing demand for managed services in the Nordics.

Apstra accelerates services scaling, offering clear visibility into the fabric with continuous validation.

“Apstra’s telemetry is fantastic,” says Petrovic. “It’s a go-to platform to get insights on our fabric.”

As a fast-growing IT service provider, Advania needs the ability to deploy best-fit solutions for its customers. Apstra supports all modern networking platforms, allowing the team to design a network that’s not locked into a single vendor and innovate freely.

“We don’t want vendor lock-in,” says Petrovic. “We want the freedom of choice for future years.” 

Advania Iceland Outcome
“Advania needed a new shared infrastructure for its outsourcing business and automation of the data center was a critical requirement. Juniper Apstra provides a single point of management across different infrastructure vendors, giving us the freedom to innovate and not lock us in.”
Darko Petrovic Principal Engineer, Advania Iceland

Published April 2022