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Juniper Gets To '1' With New QFabric Family: Page 2 of 2

The switching intelligence is contained in the QFNodes rather than in the Interconnect. The Interconnect only keeps track of ports and status. Architecturally, this is different from what Cisco is doing with the Nexus Fabric Extenders connecting to the Nexus 5000 family, where the switching smarts occurs in the Nexus 5K and the extenders are dumb. According to Germanow, the switching intelligence is distributed across the QFnodes and not replicated. In a traditional network, each node maintains a picture and routing/forwarding table to decide where to send packets and frames on the next hop. Each device is responsible for maintaining its view of the world and communicating that view to neighbors.

There could be several benefits from distributed intelligence. One of the benefits Juniper brings is better congestion management. The uplinks to the Interconnects are not Ethernet, so IEEE 802.1Qau Congestion Notification is not being used; rather, that is more of Juniper's secret sauce. Fabric topology changes--such as adding, removing or moving QFNodes' ToR switches and the movement of physical and virtual machines--might be replicated more quickly than using other L2/L3 mechanisms like route updates, TRILL and spanning tree.

Also, Juniper has visions of integrating more services into its fabric. Our friends at Brocade and Cisco want to enhance their fabric as well, but when we start talking about multiple terabits of capacity and microsecond latency, the engineering feats needed to scale services like load balancing, firewalling, etc. is staggering. Not to mention the effort required to do something much simpler like integrating the management components together.

One thing is for sure: Other network infrastructure vendors like Arista, Extreme, Force10 and HP have some catching up to do.