The Juniper QFX3500 switch, part of its QFabric initiative.
After years of planning, Juniper has launched its "Project Stratus" offering with the unveiling of the Juniper QFabric Wednesday. QFabric delivers on Juniper's 3-2-1 data center architecture, collapsing the traditional three-layer network down to a single, high-performance layer.
Data Center Foundation
After three years and more than $100 million in research and development, QFabric was designed for speed, scale and efficiency and intended to be a simplified, highly scalable data center network solution. Juniper says the QFabric architecture can deliver more performance with less power consumption than competing offerings, requiring fewer networking devices and allowing customers to use less floor space.
"QFabric is an evolutionary path to a revolution in computing," said Pradeep Sindhu, founder and CTO of Juniper. "We have fundamentally re-engineered the data center network, and with QFabric we address the demand for exponential speed, scale, security and efficiency for the next decade."
QFabric is composed of three components that create a high-performance, low latency fabric. The QF/Node acts as the distributed decision engine of the fabric; the QF/Interconnect is the high speed transport device; and the QF/Director delivers a common window, controlling all devices as one.
As the first product of the new QFabric, the Juniper QFX3500 switch is a fabric-ready edge solution with 48 dual-mode small form-factor pluggable transceiver ports and four quad small form-factor pluggable ports. The new flat architecture also enables their recently announced virtualized security solution for private and public clouds.
Advancing the Data Center
As the worldwide event was broadcast, Juniper Vice President and General Manager for the Ethernet Switching Business Unit Alex Gray gave a keynote Wednesday at the Ethernet Technology Summit in Santa Clara.
NYSE Euronext and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are evaluating how they can benefit from the performance gains the new architecture delivers. "Traditional architectures can't deliver the type of mission critical, high-speed performance our business demands in order to operate most effectively," said Andrew Bach, senior vice president, technology, NYSE Euronext. "Juniper's reduced layer model has shown the capability to provide outstanding results in the rigorous trading environment of NYSE Euronext's data centers and we're confident this is the right solution for our business and the millions of customers that rely on our systems every day."
Several of Juniper's customers and business partners such as IBM, NetApp and CA Technologies, have expressed their support for the QFabric architecture as well.
"As data growth continues to skyrocket, more organizations are moving their data centers to a unified storage infrastructure to help increase their IT flexibility and efficiency," said Chris Cummings, vice president of product and solution marketing, NetApp, Inc. "Juniper's QFabric technology complements NetApp's unified storage and Unified Connect technologies by breaking down the barriers of inefficiency with easy-to-manage, high-speed unified network access. This is critical to helping IT become an accelerator of the business."
"Enterprises and service providers must look beyond traditional multi-layered, complex and inflexible data center networks to deliver on the business requirement for a more agile IT infrastructure and technical solutions for virtualization and cloud services," said Mark Fabbi, vice president, distinguished analyst, Gartner Research. "We're seeing the emergence of a new concept we call 'Fabric Computing' and a new round of network innovation that better meets the needs of the next generation data center."
