Juniper creates new unit for data centre virtualisation

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 26 February 2009 03:51

Juniper Networks has revealed the existence of a major new business unit and a strategy to develop technology for the 'next generation' data centre fabric.

The program has been code-named the Stratus Project, and according to Juniper "represents an initiative to create a single data centre fabric that will deliver a quantum jump in scale, performance and simplicity, with the flexibility to support fully converged and virtualised data centre environments."

Juniper says the one year old Data Centre Business Group  spans multiple business groups and has already resulted in more than 30 patent applications. Leading it is Dr David Yen, a 20 year Sun Systems veteran who joined Juniper in April 2008. Yen explained that "Juniper's Stratus Project addresses the modern mega data centre's pain points and endeavours to enable cloud computing to fulfil its maximum potential."

Juniper promises that the resulting data centre fabric will be "Flat, non-blocking and lossless to support converged traffic at 10Gbe access port speed and optimised for server virtualisation...[and] scalable from tens of ports to tens of thousands of 10GbE ports with up to an order of magnitude improvement in latency over today's data centre networks."

Other than this, it has given little away about Stratus whose existence was revealed at Juniper's analyst event in California. Matt Kolon, Juniper's CTO for Asia Pacific told iTWire that "the company line is pretty vague at present...All that we are saying is do not expect to see any revenue from these products this year." He added: "In 2010 you should start to see something, but we can't say whether it wil be Q1 or Q4 or what it wil be. It is even a bit fuzzy for us at the moment."

Nor would he give any indication of the size of the new business unit other than to say "it is big". He explained the company's decision to go public with minimal details by saying "We spend vast amounts on R&D but even with that level of investment getting something like this off the ground takes multiple years. Putting all that investment in for all that time and not letting anyone know does not seem like the right thing to do...We wanted customers and the investment community and a lot of other people to know that we are doing."

However Kolon did indicate in broad terms where the company's research is heading. "Right now a data centre fabric is a big ethernet network largely constructed of the same stuff that you see in the enterprise networking market. It is a hierarchically-designed largely ethernet network in a very concentrated space...If the network is going to grow to hundreds of thousands of ports you have to do that in some way that does not require a massive hierarchy. You have to come up with an architecture that can flatten that network, and that is what is really going to change.
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