Juniper unveils QFabric for datacentres

Juniper Networks took the covers off QFabric, what it calls the world's first true datacentre fabric. It is claimed to deliver quantum leap improvements in datacentre performance, operating cost and business agility, from enterprise to large-scale cloud provider.

Engineered as a simplified, highly scalable datacentre network solution, it enables an approach to building and securing virtualised datacentres that eliminates the tradeoff between quality of experience and economics that plague legacy networks.

Juniper said QFabric enables exponential improvements in datacentre speed, scale and efficiency by removing legacy barriers, thus improving business agility.

QFabric's flat architecture also enables the industry's first integrated security solution that provides visibility, enforcement and scale across the entire physical and virtual datacentre fabric, it said.

Juniper said it invested three years and more than US$100mil  in R&D to address these constraints, creating a new architecture that is designed to be the foundation of datacentres for the next decade.


"Datacentre compute and storage technologies have advanced over the last decade, and the legacy approach to networking has not kept pace,"

"As cloud computing and the mobile Internet accelerate, demand is intensifying for a quantum leap forward in datacentre capabilities.

"With QFabric, Juniper is transforming datacentre economics by introducing the only network fabric that is able to eliminate multiple layers of cost and complexity."

Juniper claims its QFabric architecture is up to 10x faster, uses 77% less power, requires 27% fewer networking devices, occupies 90% less datacentre floor space, and delivers a nine-fold reduction in operating resources than the nearest competitive offering.

Improvements in operating expenses of this magnitude provide significant benefit to customers coping with the growing cost of continuing to scale datacentres to drive revenue and meet escalating demands driven by cloud computing and mobile Internet, it said.

"Enterprises and service providers must look beyond traditional multi-layered, complex and inflexible datacentre networks to deliver more agile IT infrastructure and technical solutions for virtualisation and cloud services," said Mark Fabbi, vice-president of industry analyst Gartner Research.

"We're seeing the emergence of a new concept we call 'fabric computing' and a new round of network innovation that better meets the needs of the next-generation datacentre."