Juniper Networks has agreed to buy Contrail Systems, a VC-backed software networking startup, for $176 million. The deal is expected to close before the end of the year. If it does, it will have been a heck of a 2012 for Contrail. The company was only founded in January of this year. Exiting Khosla Ventures provided a $10 million Series A round in July. Contrail's "architectural approach" to creating software-defined networking (SDN) technology has been seen as an improvement over current technologies like Local Area Networks (LANs) and Wide Area Networks (WANs).
