Juniper teases superdata center fabric still in the works

At the company’s analyst event today, Juniper Networks revealed plans for a large data center switch fabric whose release date is still unknown and whose development has been underway for more than a year.

Despite a lack of details, Juniper said it was talking about the project today because its customers’ planning cycles are so long.

Stratus, as the offering is currently named, is a “flat, non-blocking, lossless” data center switch fabric designed to scale to handle thousands of 10-gigabit-per-second Ethernet ports, converging Ethernet with storage traffic such as fiber channel.

The product will drastically reduce latency in data center networks and will include integrated security capabilities, said David Yen, executive vice president of Juniper’s Emerging Technologies group. “Above all, it will be managed logically like a single large Junos switch.”

The product is meant to help service providers keep up with the runaway growth of large data centers and aid the delivery of cloud-based services.

“Microprocessors and increased utilization of physical servers all contribute to this escalating pain point, which renders the oversubscription trick less effective for data center administrators as a way to contain the cost of intra-data-center networking,” Yen said. “The cost and complexity grows as a square of the number of managed networking objects.”

Stratus is being designed to ease scalability pains by converging data center traffic types such as IP, Ethernet and storage, and Juniper will partner with vendors in the server and data storage space, including IBM, to make it happen.

In a research note today, UBS analysts said Stratus -- which they predicted will become available in late 2010 -- offers "an improvement of 10x versus current technologies, at least." But Juniper and IBM will likely see counter moves from competitors before then, UBS said. "Cisco will likely have an integrated blade server and Nexus data center offering by mid 2009 versus the Juniper/IBM offering."

Juniper’s development of the new platform will follow the company’s strategic focus on the continued virtualization of data networking infrastructure beyond just servers – a strategy the company detailed earlier this month with a new product designed to virtualize the IP core.

“We’re building Stratus with the virtual machine in mind,” Yen said. “It will maximize the efficiency and elasticity provided by data center virtualization and enable cloud computing to deliver its maximum potential...Data centers are the production facilities for cloud computing, and Juniper's Stratus will be the ideal fabric for cloud computing.”

Juniper didn’t specify when Stratus would be available, only that it would not be this year and that it would make use of a generation of silicon immediately following the one the company announced for the first time today – a new processor called the “network instruction set” that includes four 65-nanometer chips and 1.2 billion transistors, yielding a total internal throughput of 640 Gb/s.