Juniper execs share network vision

Yen: We haven't told the world too much, but last year we publicly disclosed we are undertaking a project called Stratus. Marketing picked the name because stratus is a single layer of flat cloud, and it implies what we are trying to achieve. You can think about it as highly scalable, from supporting several hundred 10Gig E ports to tens of thousands of 10Gig E ports, and all at line rate, so it's not a heavily oversubscribed type of implementation.

It's one architecture, very scalable, any-to-any (any ports can connect to any other ports), it's homogenous, fair (there is no bias of, if you go this way or that way it's faster), and most importantly it is lossless. In the Internet you're allowed to drop a packet upon heavy congestion. But in the data center, for communication between servers or between servers and storage, it's totally unacceptable.

Stratus is also a converged fabric, which means instead of the current practice of using Ethernet for IP traffic, Fibre Channel for storage traffic and Infiniband as a low-latency technology, Stratus will support a converged Ethernet fabric that will support all kinds of data center traffic. And on top of that, Stratus will guarantee a very low, worse-case latency and be competitive to InfiniBand.

If your data center is small, you have 50, 200 servers, then the intranet is nothing but the interconnect among servers and storage. The total cost is low, power consumption is low, latency is relatively low. You don't really care.

But then as your scale grows so does the accumulated latency. And it's only going to get worse with multicore, multithreaded microprocessors that can significantly boost the total throughput a server can drive. And with virtualization you want to run four or eight or 16 virtual machines on one physical machine. Suddenly each server is faithfully driving its gigabyte Ethernet lines -- or 10Gig lines -- near the line rate most of the time and the cost of all of this makes the network a first-class citizen in the data center, just as much a concern as the servers, just as much a concern as the storage.