Juniper sees data center opportunity despite poor economy

SAN MATEO, CALIF. -- A sluggish economy is a perfect time for slugging it out in the data center.

That seemed to be Juniper Networks' rally cry at its annual analyst conference last week as the company launched an aggressive campaign to expand its enterprise business with a targeted assault on the data center. Juniper disclosed that it is working with partners on a multiyear project to develop a converged switching fabric for the data center; and unveiled a top-of-rack 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch optimized for low latency server access.

The developments come against a backdrop of a sputtering worldwide economy in which overall IT spending is expected to drop by as much as 15% from last year, according to Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson. Johnson would not speculate on when he expects spending to pick back up, but did say that the malaise, as well as current trends in enterprise networking, play to Juniper's strengths.

Customer requirements for "centralized" computing architectures in which resources are physically housed in data centers and dispersed to remote locations through cloud computing and virtualization demand the "pure play high performance networking" that Juniper espouses, Johnson said. Juniper claims it can lower network operations costs in the data center by 41%; and power consumption by 44% over incumbent systems.

Juniper's data center introductions are also a direct hit on Cisco's ambitions in this market. Cisco – like Juniper – is looking to make the network a centerpiece of next-generation data center architectures. But Cisco is also branching off into the compute space, dominated by longtime partners IBM and HP, with a blade server offering of its own.

Cisco's 'California' blade server, expected in the first half of this year, could strain the company's relationships with IBM and HP. Juniper, meanwhile, stressed that it intends to eagerly partner with data center compute, storage and software vendors to accelerate its ambitions.

"We are going to partner for success in the data center," said Juniper Founder and CTO Pradeep Sindhu at last week's analyst conference.

Sindhu added that the data center needs three advances: a purpose built, high-performance network; tighter coupling between compute, storage and service elements and the network; and a single management system for policies and virtualization.

"These will not be brought to you by vendors with 70% market share with no interest in upsetting the status quo," he said, in a thinly veiled reference to Cisco.

With that, Juniper unveiled its Stratus Project, a multiyear effort to develop a converged data center fabric with server, storage and software partners. Stratus is a year old and comprised of six elements: a data center manager, storage, compute, Layer 4-7 switching, appliances and networking.

Stratus 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.