With a great deal of hoopla Juniper introduced QFabric, a quite revolutionary data center networking offering that they have been alluding to for some time as Project Stratus. Although Juniper doesn't choose to think of it this way, there are clear parallels between QFabric and OpenFlow. In both cases all the decision making is done at the edge of the network (the entry and exit ports) and the control of the network is unified. In the case of QFabric, Juniper has introduced an element called a Node in the form of a top–of–rack switch. In QF 2011 a data center network consists of <100 of these switches that act in concert in a unified way (in the OpenFlow analogy), the OpenFlow controller has been implemented with elements in each of the edge T–o–R switches. There is a second element called the Director that is an X86 based appliance that serves both to help coordinate the activity of the nodes (although dynamically they don't require the Director on most actions) as well as presenting a unified management and control abstraction of the network (not unlike that management appliance in a Cisco UCS or VBlock system). The final element is the fabric proper. In this kind of architecture the interior of the network is basically a data backplane interconnecting the edge switches, and Juniper has built exactly that – a carefully designed and modularized physical network. The Fabric has three important properties: (1) cost and power requirements scale linearly with the number of edge ports in the network (conventional data center network interiors scale exponentially and fail at large scale); (2) the mesh provides feedback so that the entry nodes quickly learn of congestion at an exit node, and can use that feedback to assure that the Fabric proper will never have to drop traffic; (3) the Fabric is fully non–blocking meaning that the only time congestion will occur is if the target exit port is congested. QF is much less vendor–neutral that legacy network elements that can be intermixed. The Nodes must be connected to the Fabric although QF can grow within a heterogeneous network. So using QF is a pretty big decision. However what it offers is exciting enough that it's hard to imagine that it won't make some waves in enterprise and SP data center networking.

