Not so long ago we heard
Juniper rhyming about the 3-2-1 Datacenter Architecture and today Juniper is ready to challenge any Datacenter Switching leader with its groudbreaking technology - "
QFabric". Experts are considering this as an answer to Cisco Nexus most innovative technology so far, but when we have closer look to QFabric, it have various benefits over
Cisco's FabricPath. So, without wasting any more time lets discuss QFabric -
So, What is this QFabric ?
This is a technology which collapses multiple tier architecture into a single logical layer or rather a single logical switch for the entire datacenter, providing a seamless and lossless any to any connection... Ahhh Sounds too heavy to disgest...
okie... Lets see how QFabric does all this magical stuff.
The architecture breakdown the traditional switch into three components, an ingress-egress platform called a node, an
interconnect platform corresponding to a switch backplane and a management platform that gives a single view of the fabric.
The node has switching and routing intelligence about all relevant paths through the fabric and makes Layer 2 and 3 forwarding
decisions. Since nodes are logically connected peers, there is no need for aggregating ports with banks of access switches
that feed aggregation switches that feed core switches. Packets are switched directly to the appropriate egress port.
This sounds good but does this actually gives a performance boost to the datacenter network and how does this architecture deals with peak hour performance blue's or congestion ?
So, Here is the answer to that -
Packets are processed once and forwarded to the appropriate port without
having to be reprocessed at every layer of a hierarchical
architecture. Packets get through the infrastructure in a single hop. With its knowledge of other nodes, each node can sense congestion as it develops and adjust its forwarding rate accordingly. The whole fabric remains lossless even under congestion. Juniper claims that maximum delay on the longest terminated datacenter link would be 5 MS and shorter the better. I was unable to find much on this mechanism as this feature is patent pending by Juniper, May be we will get to know more about this very soon.
Juniper is planning to integrate WAN connectivity module into this technology to make it a perfect fit for Cloud Computing Architecture.
I am not very sure how much I was able to explain about QFabric, But the video below should do the job -
Now, when compared to Cisco Nexus FabricPath, QFabric has its own set of advantages. Lets have a look at them in brief here -
So, Thats all with QFabric today... Will try to find and post more about it very soon.