Juniper said Tuesday it is partnering with server, storage and software companies to develop a converged data center fabric under a multiyear project that will compete with Cisco’s largely solo effort.
Juniper’s Stratus Project is a year old and comprises six elements: a data center manager, storage, compute, Layer 4-7 switching, appliances and networking. It is intended to be a flat, non-blocking, lossless fabric supporting tens of thousands of Gigabit Ethernet ports, an order of magnitude reduction in latency, no single point of failure, and with security tightly integrated and virtualized.
Stratus is expected to support the Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) data center fabric specifications being defined and endorsed by several vendors.