With Stratus, Juniper is looking to essentially deconstruct three-tier data center switching architectures into two, and . This is intended to increase performance and reduce operational time and cost by eliminating the need to deploy and manage additional products.

Sources say the Stratus switches will support a common control plane and a virtual data plane across Layer 2 switches. While physically dispersed, each switch port will function as if it is one virtual hop away from any other port.

The switches will also feature port-level virtual Layer 2/3 services that can migrate with workloads, sources say. This is similar to the virtual machine service profile mapping feature and already support, or announced support for, on their respective Nexus and VDX data center switches.

"If you think about Juniper's Virtual Chassis, I believe it extends these capabilities across a fabric," one source said. "The added benefit is L3 services, especially for ."

Virtual Chassis allows several fixed-configuration Juniper EX switches to be combined into a single logical switch for increased scale and density, and to reduce a three-tier switching architecture into two tiers. Juniper has disclosed plans to across more EX switches and MX routers.