Juniper Networks foresees single data centre fabric

Code-named the Stratus Project, the initiative is being developed by Juniper's newly announced Data Centre Business Group, under the leadership of executive vice president David Yen.

It promises to deliver a quantum leap in scale, performance and simplicity, with the flexibility to support fully converged and virtualised data centre environments, said the firm.

According to Juniper, the new platform will be flat, non-blocking and lossless to support converged traffic at 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) access port speed and optimised for server virtualisation.

It will also be able to scale from just a handful of ports to tens of thousands of 10GbE ports, and will offer an order of magnitude improvement in latency over today's datacentre networks.

"Juniper's Stratus Project addresses the modern mega data centre's pain points and endeavours to enable cloud computing to fulfil its maximum potential, " said Yen.

"Reinventing and flattening the datacentre network is a very hard problem to solve and it requires a unique set of expertise and resources to tackle this challenge."

Yen said that legacy architectures are holding companies back from realising the full potential of their data centres.

He foresees a future in which super datacentres can harness the scale to dynamically allocate any resource, including routing and security services, storage, appliances and servers.

The Stratus Project, which Juniper has been working on for more than a year, gets its name from the 'stratus' cloud, a flat, single layer formation.

It was initially inspired and led by Juniper's chief technology officer and founder Pradeep Sindhu.

To date the development has resulted in Juniper filing more than 30 patent applications.

The firm's Data Center Infrastructure Solutions, which first launched last November, are being evolved as an introduction to the Stratus Project.

These comprise the EX Series Ethernet Switches, MX Series Ethernet Services Routers and SRX Series Services Gateways.

Juniper also announced the EX2500 line, its first 10Gb access switch for datacentres, which provides 24 10GbE SFP+ ports and 700ns latency.

The EX2500 will be available in the second quarter of 2009 at a starting price of US$18,000.