Juniper Networks Introduces 'Breakthrough' Data Center

After three years of development, $100 million in investments and 125 filed patents, Juniper Networks (News - Alert) unveiled its “breakthrough” data center, the QFabric, today in San Francisco in front of its partners, customers and organizations.

Despite the fact that most businesses and organizations are increasingly starting to depend on the network and that the world has begun to “bet big” on data centers, the data centers themselves have been failing consumers, according to Juniper.

“Data centers are playing a more significant role in the environment that we live in and the demands that are placed on data centers are at an all-time high and growing exponentially,” said CEO of Juniper Kevin Johnson during the live public unveiling of QFabric.

When companies create data centers, they tend to optimize around one of three criteria, according to Johnson –  speed, scale or efficiency.  

The challenge that arises from focusing on a single criteria are that customers are “faced with the tyranny of or – I have to pick one or the other – and that’s a forced compromise that should no longer exist,” Johnson said.

“What is needed is a fundamental rethink so the network can become an ally versus an enemy of data center innovation,” he said.

QFabric takes all these criteria into account and provides a “quantum leap forward,” providing benefits in scalability, speed and performance. The data center also works to “dramatically change” the economics associated with capital and operational expenditures. It provides solutions that are 10 times faster than the most powerful legacy approach on the market today, it uses 27 percent fewer devices and 77 percent less power and it gives off 1/5 of the carbon emissions for large data center.

For an average 500-server data center, QFabric is six times faster, uses less floor spaces and cuts operating expenses in half.

“QFabric is a technology that will revolutionize computing and it’s going to change forever the way in which data centers are built,” said Pradeep Sindhu, vice president of the board of directors at Juniper, at the presentation.

The new data center will improve the performance of the fastest computer on the planet by 100 times in five years, according to Sindhu. With a data center performing 100 times better than the current fastest  computer on the planet, Sindhu surmised today what could be done with those capabilities:  the harnessing of fusion to produce unlimited energy, the discovery of drugs to cure diseases, the dramatic acceleration of the rate of innovation and the discovery of new materials that could spawn industries.

QFabric also offers a 10 times increase in computer performance, a 10 times increase in data center efficiency and a 10 times reduction in data center operational expenses.

“The average size of data centers is going to grow fairly dramatically and QFabric is going to be the enabler,” Sindhu said.

The QFabric architecture consists of three elements: the Nodes, which contain the logic to forward packets and operate fabrics control plane;  the InterConnect, which is the internal mechanism to transport data directly from one node to another, and the Director, which is a common window for controlling and managing all QFabric components.

There are several defining characteristic of QFabric, according to the company, including low latency and jitter, no packet drops under congestion, linear cost and power scaling, modular distributed implementation and single logical device.

Described as “one of the world’s top computing facilities” and “one of the fastest supercomputers on earth,” QFabric provides benefits that “are truly limitless,” according to company officials.