Hey Guys.. Just arrived back from the Juniper's Partners Event and got to learn, evaluate and compare Juniper's QFabric technology in detail. After a detailed analysis I was able to conclude that QFabric is not their answer to Cisco's Fabric, infact its a "Jaw breaker". QFabric is much superior technology when compared to Fabricpath & TRILL (Infact its not even worth comparing, As they are still stuck in handling STP). Lets try to understand whats to so good about QFabric -
Okie, Above is the network diagram how your network would look like with QFabric. This network comprises of three (3) components -
- QFabric Interconnects - A high-speed transport device that serves as the backplane in a QFabric architecture, interconnecting all QFabric Node edge devices in a full- mesh topology.
- Qfabric Nodes - Turns the line cards that typically reside within a modular chassis into high-density, fixed-configuration, top-of-rack edge devices that provide access into and out of the fabric.
- Qfabric Director - (Shown as Coordinator Controller above) QFabric System's Routing Engine and provides all control and management services for the fabric.
These QFabric components work together, behaving as a single logical,
efficient, switch that enables any-to-any connectivity for servers,
storage, existing network components, and other critical systems in the
data center. The QFabric System scales to support 6,144 ports and delivers latency of
5 microseconds under typical loads in a nonblocking and lossless
architecture that supports Layer 2, Layer 3 and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) traffic.
So, Virtually you will have a single switch for your entire Datacenter hence making it a single tier network architecture which would enable direct communication among all your datacenter devices eliminating multi hop packet transits and cutting down latency minimum to nano seconds in few cases and maximum to 5 Ms.
Considering your datacenter is covering 250 meters (Thats a pretty big Datacenter, Do you guys remember the 100 meter race in schools) and the maximum latency is 5 Ms, Thats as fast as light !!!
If you look at the virtualised core. your network would look like this -
Amazed ?? but thats true - Every node connected directly to other nodes. The best part which I personally liked about QFabric is that It uses the same JUNOS as rest of the Juniper appliances. So, you dont have to be worried about handling this technology monster, If you can handle Juniper's any device, you will be able to handle this too.
To wind it up lets give it a thought that Juniper has only been in the Ethernet switching market for around 3
years. In that timeframe, the company has delivered some of the
industries fastest switches and created a switching architecture that
eliminated a network tier what competitor like Cisco, 3COM, Foundry etc were not able to do since their inception. Cisco is trying to sell the same old stuff in a new package everytime. They seem so obsessed with the Three Tier Architecture that whatever they do ultimately lands on 3 Tier - An examle to this would be a datacenter with Nexus 7k (Core), Nexus 5K (Distribution) and Nexus 2K (Edge).
I believe either Cisco is confused between a datacenter and a server room or is having some hard time to find good brains. whatever none of my business but I liked QFabric and would post about its detailed working very soon, In case you can't resist yourself from immidiate action, you can find more info about QFabric here