Even so, the promised improvements over current data center performance are worth considering even if a business has a data center built of another vendor’s gear, says Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. consulting firm. “If you are a business refreshing data-center infrastructure in the next two or three years, you need to take a look at this,” Nolle says.

QFabric is the outcome of what Juniper has been calling Project Stratus, which was thought to be a faster conventional data center core switch. And in fact the QFX3500 does function as a conventional switch in its first iteration coming out later this quarter. But in Q3, a software upgrade will turn it into a node in the QFabric architecture, enabling it to make peer-to-peer routing decisions and rate limit to handle congestion as part of a distributed control plane.

Juniper’s founder and CTO Pradeep Sindhu says customers could migrate to the new fabric gradually even if they currently use another vendor’s gear. As current network equipment is refreshed, modules of QFabric could be deployed in tandem with legacy infrastructure. Because the Juniper line uses standard interfaces – Ethernet and Fibre Channel – it can interface with other products.

QFabric won’t be limited to data centers, Sindhu says. Later this year the company will explain how it can be worked into the WAN so data centers can be connected with improved performance.

 Nolle says this is important because it would enable a scalable cloud infrastructure that can truly disperse resources anywhere yet provide reliable and predictable performance.