FOCUS NEWS TECHNOLOGY
Issue 15, April/May
JUNIPER’S SWITCH TO A FLATTER FABRIC
The most anticipated product announcement of spring was that of a switch. Juniper Networks announced the first product in its QFabric line. QFabric is the production brand for products developed under what was the Stratus project.
The product is the QFX3500 top-of-rack switch. It can act as a standalone switch, or as one of the three hardware components of QFabric.
According to Juniper, the architecture has two essential capabilities. One is that it enables data center compute, storage, services and network resources to be treated as “fully fungible pools” that can be partitioned dynamically and quickly. The second is for resources to be connected to each other at very high speeds, with the only limit in the interconnect being interface bandwidth and small transit latency.
NETWORKING
CommScope expanded its high- density fiber solution to allow for multiple LC pass-through panels and splicing to make cabling in the data center more suited to the growing amount of storage area network (SAN) applications. The product supports both MPO pre-terminated solutions, as well as factory and field-termination preferences, and the LC connectivity backbone promises flexibility for SAN connectivity. It can accommodate up to 144 LC connections in a 1U space by splicing or using existing LC- terminated trunk cables.
MODULARITY
NxGen Modular announced NxPower, which it said can help clients reduce time to deploy backup power infrastructure. The dimensions of two of the modules are 12ft by 62ft, and the third module is 10ft by 62ft. The solution’s total footprint is 32ft by 64ft. A battery room was deployed
Three basic design elements of QFabric are: data, control plane and management plane. On the data plane, every port is connected directly to every other port, and packets are processed by a single full look-up. Centralized shared tables on the control plane have information about all ports, managed from a single-point management plane.
The fabric is separated from i/o ports, and copper traces are replaced with fiber links, which addresses physical limitations to scalability. Multiple fabric switches are used for redundancy and scale.
The hardware components that enable QFabric are QF Interconnect, QF Node and QF Director.
QF Director is the brain of the fabric – a 2U x86 box that provides the network with federated intelligence. QF Interconnect is a chassis that supports 128 QSPF connectors running at wire speed and providing throughput of up to
on top of the module assembly, enabling the client to avoid construction of a separate one. The solution is customizable, with the vendor able to take customers’ switchgear, UPS systems and other electrical-room components and integrate them into the final NxGen product.
It took NxGen 14 weeks to deliver the modules to the client’s construction site from the day the client signed the contract for the new solution.
SOFTWARE
Managing cloud environments is a challenge beyond traditional management tools, said VMware at the launch of vCenter, a toolset for managing vSphere virtual and physical environments.
Under the vCenter Operations brand are CapacityIQ, Configuration Manager and Integrien Alive. vCenter Operations will be available in Standard, Advanced
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10 terabytes per second. Finally, the QF Node component is a 1U box that provides 48 SFP+ and SFP ports, supporting both 10GbE and 1GbE. QFX3500, the switch to be rolled out this quarter, acts as a node.
Not everyone is convinced by Juniper’s execution. See the networking debate, part of our FOCUS cloud special.
Juniper’s new QFabric switch
and Enterprise editions. Standard offers performance management, with capacity and change awareness for VMware vSphere- virtualized and cloud environments. Advanced can add more advanced capacity analytics and planning to the Standard version. Enterprise offers performance, capacity and configuration management capabilities for both virtual and physical environments. It comes with customizable dashboards as well as smart alerting and application awareness. The first versions of these editions will be available in late Q1, with prices starting at US$50 per VM.
nlyte and Future Facilities integrated their respective products, a suite of DCIM tools and 6SigmaDC, designed for computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-assisted data center design and management. In addition to technical integration, the companies will also coordinate marketing, sales and services.
As part of a monitoring tool release, Canadian firm Cirba said it has developed a metric for measuring server infrastructure requirements. Using the fully loaded utilization (UFL) metric, data center operators can see how much infrastructure is required to service workloads safely.
Rackspace launched commercial support offerings for OpenStack, an open-source cloud operating system developed as part of an industry consortium. Called Rackspace Cloud Builders, the firm’s business includes training and certification, deployment services and ongoing support for the operation of OpenStack. Members of the OpenStack community include Citrix, Dell, Equinix, Intel and Microsoft.
See full articles at www.datacenterdynamics. com/focus
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