Juniper’s Stratus Project Materializes: QFabric Promises Massive Scale for Enterprise Data Center

| Feb 24, 2011 | Enterprise Networking, Data Center Technology
| Analyst: Mike Spanbauer

Event Summary

February 23, 2011 -- Juniper unveiled its data center fabric architecture, QFabric. The company promised to deliver on commitments made over the last couple of years. Approaching data center networking with a new perspective, it has broken up a chassis switch into three discrete elements that offer scale and performance unseen to date in data center switching. Scaling to over 6,000 10G ports with latency under 5µs, Juniper’s QFabric offering should meet the needs of many.

Quick Take

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Very positive on Juniper’s announcement of QFabric, because it will force the industry to consider new switching concepts and move data center architectures beyond box-to-box limitations. The fully virtualized data center is already several years in, and network architectures are slowly catching up.

• Vendor Importance: Very high to Juniper, as the project represents four years of investment and R&D in addition to delivering on some bold promises made over the last couple of years. Delivery and execution will be key, and success will depend on ramping both the VAR channel and the systems integrators for global delivery.

• Market Impact: High on the data center market, due to the unique architecture and approach to solving high-performance networking challenges. Juniper’s QFabric addresses a challenge that customers have faced for some time and other vendors have been handling via different means. The concept of a network fabric is not a new one and other vendors approach it differently, but the scale provided by Juniper’s QFabric certainly “ups” the game and changes the table stakes.

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Competitive Strengths and Weaknesses

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Analytical Perspective

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