Data Center Fabric

A true data center network fabric interconnects thousands of server, storage and other network ports in a flat, ultra-low latency infrastructure that provides any-to-any connectivity, ensuring that every device is a single hop away from every other device.

Since the fabric functions as a single, logical device, it preserves the operational construct, performance and simplicity of a single switch while delivering the scalability and resiliency of a data center network. A flat fabric-based network architecture also eliminates the need for multiple layers of devices, switch-to-switch interactions, and shared network protocols.

Consequently, a data center network fabric dramatically simplifies network management and operations while improving performance, even if the network scales from tens of ports to thousands of ports. Servers, storage, and other data center devices can be seamlessly added to the data center because of the fabric’s high degree of scalability.

Juniper Networks QFabric technology delivers such a data center network fabric—a solution that flattens the entire network to a single tier where all access points are equal, eliminating the effects of network locality. The QFabric architecture also eliminates the need for protocols such as Spanning Tree, TRILL or SPB while reducing network latency to microseconds, improving the performance of every application in the data center.

By operating as a single device, the QFabric system—composed of the QFabric Interconnect, QFabric Director and QFabric Nodes—improves efficiency and simplifies operations by dramatically reducing the number of managed components from many to only one.