"The QFabric is a gutsy move, and we say, 'Let's not just follow the conventional wisdom,'" said David Yen, executive VP and general manager of the Fabric and Switching Technologies Group at Juniper, in an interview in which he took aim at networking industry leader Cisco Systems. "It's easier for Juniper to think that and much more difficult for Cisco to think that way after they have been selling the customer for years lots of boxes and cables," said Yen.
An early QFabric customer is NYSE Euronext, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange and other exchanges abroad. The company is planning to build two new data centers of up to 500,000 square feet each in the United States and the United Kingdom, says Andrew Bach, senior VP and global head of network services. Speedy processing of stock orders is critical for NYSE Euronext, says Bach, but as software and servers got better at processing orders, the network was slower by comparison. "Now my network latency is becoming a major component of my total turnaround time, so that's why we had to go after this problem," he says.
In addition to Cisco, Juniper faces competition from Brocade Communications Systems and HP, from its acquisition of 3Com in 2010. In a statement, Brocade CTO Dave Stevens said his company is also pursuing a network fabric strategy, having begun shipping the VDX line of switches in December.
Stevens criticized the proprietary nature of Juniper's technology. "There are two competing industry standards [TRILL and Shortest Path Bridging] that are well into implementation by multiple vendors for the construction of Ethernet fabrics. They [Juniper] are not supporting either and are instead building a system that is by definition proprietary from end to end," Stevens said.
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