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Note: The company plans to make its Ethernet switching fabric smaller, faster, and cheaper--but not all at once.
Juniper Networks was one of the first to challenge Cisco with an Ethernet switching fabric, announcing the ambitious QFabric architecture in February. At this week's Interop 2011 in Las Vegas, a UBM TechWeb event, it was joined by many other rivals launching or demonstrating Ethernet fabrics of their own, while the departure of QFabric architect David Yen for Cisco left some questions as to its future strategy.
Like other fabrics, the basic idea behind Juniper's is to make the network flatter, cutting out the rigid tree architecture in favor of more meshed links, offering the flexibility needed to support virtualization and enterprise clouds. The vision is to treat...