Juniper targets Cisco with "more radical" QFabric

Juniper has launched its response to Cisco’s virtualised networking approach with a unified-fabric architecture called QFabric.

“This is probably one of the most important announcements we’ve made,” said Brian Hutson, data centre consulting system engineer, Juniper Networks. “For us it’s the game changer on how companies approach data centres.”

The architecture was supported by partners IBM, NetApp, CA Tecnnologies and VMware.

Hutson said the company sought to build a networking architecture from scratch that was optimised for application delivery and was less hierarchical. Hutson claimed that latency was less than 5 milliseconds “from one side of the fabric to the other”, increasing performance by seven to 10 times.

Hutson said QFabric was a more radical invention than Cisco’s. “I think the difference is that this is a radical change. I think a lot of other vendors have looked at it from the point of view of, let’s get this fabric and make it work with other devices.

“We’ve built it from the ground up to be radically different. They’ve retained that old legacy approach and just tried to simplify the management and improve the speed. We’ve really been able to improve the speed, scale and performance of the fabric.”

Radical changes included putting intelligence at the edge of the network, Hutson said. “We’ve put the intelligence on the edge of the network so switches can make the decisions and work as a single device to provide predictable performance and scale.

“Why not treat all [switches] as a single giant device where it can make a decision instantly and act as a single switch?”

QFabric was comprised of three components. QF/Node, the distributed decision engine that powered the switches; QF Interconnect, a high speed transport device; and QF/Director, a management platform.

The first product was the QFX3500 switch which could operate as a standalone 64-port 10Gigabit Ethernet switch with FCoE and Fibre Channel ports and had a retail of about $US30,000.
QF/Interconnect and QF/Director were due in Q3, Hutson said.

Juniper would provide training in Australia and New Zealand “in the next few months”, Hutson said. 

Juniper's decision to flatten three networks to one was a validation of Cisco's approach, responded Phil Harris, CTO for Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Company, which oversees development of VBlock.