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Juniper Q-fabric Solution

 Today I am going to talk about the Juniper Q-Fabric solution which is an alternate approach to the Cisco SDA - Software Defined Access solution in the market. If you check the SDA in detail, Cisco uses Fabric network and on the top of it they are using LISP and VXLAN in the campus environment as a overlay protocols. On top of it there is Automation, Analytics and Authentication which is then connected via different APIs in the network.


Let's talk about the Q-fabric which is introduced by Juniper in the market. The so called Q-fabric of juniper is composed of multiple components working together as a single switch to provide high-performance, any-to-any connectivity and management simplicity in the data center or in the campus as well that depends where the requirement actually have.

QFabric System flattens the entire data center network to a single tier where all access points are equal, eliminating the effects of network locality and making it the ideal network foundation for cloud-ready, virtualized data centers.

With the help of QFabric System you can actually improves application performance with low latency and converged services in a nonblocking, lossless architecture that supports Layer 2, Layer 3, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) capabilities.

Fig 1.1- Juniper Q-Fabric between two Pods

Juniper introduces two different models in the Q-Fabric systems on the basis of the requirement and the infrastructure. One of them is QFX3000-M QFabric System and other is QFX3000-G QFabric System. So both of these have the different platform and the different requirements and throughputs. I will not talk about the much for both the types of Q-Fabric models which Juniper is pitching in the market.

There are components to represent the Q-fabric architecture. These components are as follows:
  • QFabric Nodes- These Qfabric Nodes are fixed-configuration edge platforms that connect to networked data center devices.
  • QFabric Interconnect- These QFabric Interconnect is a high-speed transport device that connects all QFabric Nodes in a full-mesh topology.
  • QFabric Director- These Qfabric Director provides control and management services for the full QFabric System.
Fig 1.2- Network Topology using Q-Fabric  Nodes and Interconnect
Above is the example showing the whole architecture of the Juniper Q-Fabric where you have Q-Fabric nodes, Q-Fabric interconnect and Q-Fabric Director.

Features Of Q-Fabric
  • With the help of the Q-fabric systems, you can Scales to 40 Tbps to deliver unprecedented capacity beyond 10GbE at the access layer.
  • With the help of the Q-fabric you can have Ultra-low deterministic latency is ideal for supporting latency-sensitive applications, east-west traffic flows, virtualization, cloud, and other high-performance data center initiatives.
  • With the help of the Q-Fabric you can have Carrier-class solution requires no downtime for reconfiguration or maintenance
  • You can also scales to thousands of ports within a single-tier network in a “pay-as-you-grow” model.