Juniper Unveils Stratus, Dubbed 'QFabric'

Email Print Digg This Add to del.icio.us

The confluence of networking and cloud computing is clearly big business, prompting a massive multi-year investment by Juniper. Sean Michael Kerner reports.

For the last three years, Juniper has said it was working on Project Stratus, a new data center fabric for cloud computing designed to reduce network layers and complexity. Today, Juniper took the wraps off Stratus, which will be productized as "QFabric." The QFabric effort involved $100 million of investment and resulted in over 125 filed patents.

Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson explained during a QFabric launch event that in traditional network architectures, each layer of a network requires some processing before a packet is transported. The QFabric approach is different.

"We process once and we transport to any," Johnson said. "By doing that what we're able to provide are significant benefits in the areas of scalability, speed and performance."

Pradeep Sindhu, founder and CTO of Juniper noted that QFabric involves silicon, systems and software in order to collapse network layers. From a network topology perspective, Sindhu noted that QFabric enables a network to look like a single flat switch that can then be more easily managed and provisioned.

Read the rest about Juniper's QFabric at Enterprise Networking Planet.