Customer Success Story
Network automation enables data center growth
eMAG is an ecommerce pioneer, having built one of the largest marketplace platforms in central and eastern Europe. Founded over 20 years ago, eMAG has introduced technology-based services that help shoppers save time and money. Over 6.7 million people have installed the eMAG app, and the platform registers more than 120 million visits each month. eMAG uses Juniper Apstra for an automated, secure multivendor data center network to deliver a seamless shopping experience for millions of people across Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria.
Overview
| Company | eMAG |
| Industry | Retail |
| Region | EMEA |
75%
Greater IT agility
Faster time to deploy data center switches with Apstra
120M
Better digital experience
Visits a month
10 min
Speed operations
To configure and deploy new switch in fabric
eMAG needed to scale the performance and availability of its data centers to keep up with the rapid growth of its online marketplace and mobile app. With an 8x increase in the number of data center switches, manual configuration and operations of the flat Layer 2 network became untenable, risking human error and downtime.
A modern data center fabric delivered scalability, efficiency, and lower latency to support eMAG’s growing virtual workloads and bare-metal servers. The open-source SONIC network operating system and multivendor switching were also a must. Adding network automation eliminated manual configuration and operation of the fabric, providing service reliability and allowing eMAG’s NetOps team to be nimble.
To realize its vision for an automated data center, eMAG put Juniper Apstra to work. The vendor-agnostic Apstra software automates management of the SONIC overlay network and 40 physical switches, allowing eMAG to maintain reliable operations while protecting its tech investments. The dev team can now easily provision network services for their growing workload needs.
Zero Trust security is automatically enforced across data centers, extending access control, authentication, and advanced threat prevention across every point of connection on the network. With Apstra and a modern IP fabric, eMAG can segment its network to safeguard applications and data across its business units and countries of operations.
Reliable fabric operations and multivendor flexibility
Apstra simplifies the design and deployment of eMAG’s multivendor fabric and enables consistent, reliable performance to support better digital shopping experiences for customers and employees. With a flexible and automated data center network, eMAG can bring new services to market faster and scale reliably.
Define policies based on intended business outcomes
Apstra’s validated designs and blueprints simplified the data center fabric configuration and deployment, and eMAG’s NetOps team can add new switches in minutes. When an infrastructure change is needed, they can simply modify the Apstra template and all switches are automatically updated.
Empower reliable network operations
Apstra’s multivendor telemetry and flow data provide complete network visibility for in-depth analysis of traffic patterns, performance optimization, security, and capacity planning. Apstra continuously validates the policies, significantly improving service delivery times and reducing mean time to resolution.
Avoid vendor lock-in
As the only solution of its kind with multivendor support, Apstra empowers eMAG to automate and manage its data center comprised of a SONIC overlay and multivendor switch underlay network.
Published March 2025