Lumeta, a privately-held provider of network discovery solutions, has joined the Juniper Networks SDN Technology Program to integrate its flagship IPsonar suite with the vendor’s newly unveiled Contrail platform. The latter offering builds on technology Juniper obtained through the 2012 acquisition of Contrail Systems to decouple network management functions from the underlying hardware.

Contrail is based on an open controller that virtualizes physical network infrastructure to enhance orchestration and simplify the deployment of IP-based services. According to Lumeta, iPsonar will take advantage of this abstraction to help organizations “test the security posture of their virtualized networks within an ever-changing SDN environment.” The solution tracks real-time network activity to identify cloud uplinks and unauthorized connections.

“Juniper’s vision for SDN through the Contrail family embraces open standards-based IP solutions,” said Matt Webster, the chief executive officer of Lumeta. “We are looking forward to working with Juniper to expand options for our clients as they move to the open, cloud and virtualized network environments and to keep those clients in a state of continuous cyber situational awareness through the use of IPsonar ESI.”

Lumeta and Juniper have made the decision to jump on the software-defined network bandwagon a few weeks after VMware unveiled its own network virtualization product. Dubbed NSX, the EMC subsidiary’s SDN platform leverages technology from Nicira to treat the physical network as an abstracted pool of transport capacity. The company says that the solution simplifies management while delivering unified automation, visibility and increased control.

NSX is complemented by Virtual SAN, a software-defined storage utility that transforms direct attached storage, disks and flash into one big data store. Similar to NSX, Virtual SAN serves as an abstraction layer for resource-intensive virtual desktop, test/dev and disaster recovery environments.