Juniper QFabric

The Juniper Networks QFabric family of products offers a revolutionary approach that delivers quantum leap improvements in data center performance, operating costs, and business agility for enterprises, high-performance computing systems, and large-scale cloud providers. The QFabric family implements a single-tier network in the data center, enabling exponential improvements in speed, scale and efficiency by removing legacy barriers and improving business agility.

The QFabric family includes two members:

• QFabric System:

  Composed of three separate components — the QFabric Node, QFabric Interconnect and QFabric Director—the QFabric System creates a high-performance, ultra-low latency fabric that unleashes the full power of the data center with the simplicity of a single switch.

• QFX3500 Switch:

  The QFX3500 is a standalone 48-port 10GbE top-of-rack switch with four 40GbE uplink ports and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and FC gateway functionality. With a simple software and configuration change, the QFX3500 can also provide the QFabric Node functionality in a QFabric System.

Features & Benefits:

• Performance

  The QFabric architecture can scale up to 40 Tbps, providing unprecedented capacity for moving beyond 10GbE at the access layer. In addition, QFabric’s ultra-low deterministic latency provides an order of magnitude improvement over traditional network architectures, making it ideal for supporting latency-sensitive applications, east-west traffic flows, virtualization, cloud computing, and other high-performance data center initiatives.

• Management

  Presenting itself as a single switch running the Junos operating system, the QFabric architecture greatly simplifies data center management. Fewer switches in the data center translates into significantly less complexity and operational expense, as well as lower power, space, and cooling costs. As a reliable carrier-class solution with no single point of failure and requiring no downtime for reconfiguration and maintenance, the QFabric architecture also maximizes network availability.

• Scale

  The QFabric architecture supports a highly efficient "pay-as-you-grow" model that can scale from a few hundred ports to 6,000 ports within a single-tier network. QFX3500 Switches can be introduced into data centers incrementally as top-of-rack devices, interoperating with the current switch infrastructure. Over time, the QFX3500s can be converted to a QFabric Node edge device through a simple software configuration change, allowing customers to transition to a QFabric solution without requiring a wholesale replacement of the existing network.

• Green Solution

  The QFabric architecture is environmentally conscious, allowing enterprises to optimize every facet of the data center network while consuming less power, requiring less cooling, and producing a fraction of the carbon footprint of legacy multi-tiered data center networks.