Juniper's answer to Cisco in the data center: Stratus Project

SAN MATEO, CALIF. -- 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.

Juniper isn't naming names yet as to which companies it is partnering with on the Stratus Project, but did recently outline its cloud computing plans with IBM.  

Stratus will be managed like a large JUNOS-based switch, said David Yen, Juniper executive vice president for emerging technologies, at the company's annual analyst conference here this week. (New CEO Kevin Johnson shared a grim IT spending outlook at the event.)

Stratus is designed to relieve data center scaling "pain" due to latency, power, space, cost and complexity, Yen said. It is also intended to support data center virtualization for "elasticity and efficiency," he said.

Yen would not provide details into Stratus products, configurations, pricing or availability. He indicated, though, that it will not have a material impact on Juniper's 2009 revenue.

Juniper is announcing Stratus now to allow customers to plan their long-term data center migration strategies, Yen said.

"Stratus extends Juniper's high-performance networking core competencies into the data center," Yen said. "It allows Juniper to enter a new addressable market space. We have no vested interest in prolonging suboptimal legacy architectures. We are in a unique position to revolutionize the data center."

Cisco is looking to transform data centers by developing its own blade servers that integrate networking, compute power and virtualization, and that utilize the company's networking incumbency. Cisco is believed to be partnering with VMware and BMC Software for this project, which is code-named California, but is testing its longtime relationships with data center server stalwarts IBM and HP with the project.

"With one stroke, Juniper is devaluing Cisco's incumbency," says Tom Nolle, president of consultancy CIMI Corp. "They are positioning away from current technologies [such as FibreChannel and Infiniband] that have no accommodation to the fabric as a network backplane, or as the basis for future virtualization support.

"Cisco has a lot of collisions with incumbents," Nolle adds. "Juniper cannot hope to match Cisco in breadth so it is making that an asset instead of a liability. Juniper is timing its success with Stratus to the economy's recovery and to developing symbioses with partners."