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Juniper leapfrogs Cisco with QFabric data center

24.02.2011
Juniper Networks today announced the results of $100 million in research and development: for data center infrastructure called QFabric, formerly code-named   The company says QFabric will boost data center throughput 10-fold and be able to scale 12 times larger than conventional architectures while cutting costs for infrastructure and operations. Analysts and beta users say they are impressed.

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Four years in the making, QFabric promises from two or three layers to one, drastically reducing the number of devices needed to build a data-center network.

The new architecture creates what is logically a single data center switch overseen by a management platform that gives one view of the fabric. QFabric is supported by three devices – the director management platform, the interconnect switching fabric and the node, which handles ingress and egress ports.

In making the announcement, the company showed three products to support QFabric – QF Director, QF Internconnect chassis and the QFX3500 node. 

The performance improvements that QFabric claims would put Juniper ahead of and HP for performance, says Rob Whiteley, an analyst with Forrester Research. Brocade comes the closest as a competitor for a data center fabric, he says, and it remains to be seen how the two will stack up. There are no full-fabric deployments of either yet, he says.