New Juniper solution simplifies datacenter networks 10 November, 2008 By Chris Talbot

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Juniper Networks Data Center Infrastructure Solutions were designed to reduce network complexity in a way similar to how virtualization reduced server complexity. According to the vendor, the solutions can reduce total cost of ownership by up to 52 per cent in capital expenditures, by up to 44 per cent in power, up to 44 per cent in cooling, and up to 55 per cent in rack space in the datacenter.

When looking at the biggest pain points for datacenter networks, Juniper concluded that what is causing the greatest problems today is how network architecture is built, said Viswesh Ananthakrishnan, director of datacenter solutions line management at Juniper Networks. Every device or layer has its own operating system. Security and the network is itself is very complicated, he said. Juniper's goal was to remove much of the cost and complexity, allowing the resources to be re-allocated to other business processes.

"Most datacenters today have multiple switching tiers in getting from storage or the servers all the way up to the WAN edge," Ananthakrishnan said. "The reason why you have this situation is the kinds of devices they have deployed were really designed for the campus environment 10 years ago, and it's the same switches that have been re-purposed for the datacenter."

With current architectures, the only way to aggregate all of the systems is to build multiple tiers to the network, which Ananthakrishnan said takes up a lot of space and consumes a lot of power. Additionally, it's a difficult environment to manage because each device or layer has its own operating system and IT staff need to be trained on all of the various operating systems and technology. It takes a long time to deploy new services on the datacenter network, he added.

If the network was one device, it would be a lot easier to manage, and it would also eliminate any latency and congestion points on the network. Unfortunately, it's not yet possible to realistically do this, but Juniper is pushing towards that end goal of "network nirvana," Ananthakrishnan said.

The first step is to take the access switches and reduce the total number of devices that have to be managed. The new Juniper datacenter solution does that, he said.

"We can now manage up to 10 different racks," he said. They can also be managed as a single switching entity.

Ananthakrishnan described the solution as a virtual chassis architecture that reduces the total number of connections going to the aggregated tiers, which in turn reduces the total cost of operating the datacenter network and the amount of space necessary to store the physical infrastructure.

"What we have achieved with the virtual chassis combined with line rate 10 gigabyte-Ethernet ... is we have reduced the total number of switches in the aggregation tier," he said.

All of this is tied into Juniper's JUNOS operating system so that only one piece of software is required to manage the entire system.

According to Ananthakrishnan, Juniper channel partners are accustomed to selling the vendor's security products, and as the company moves more towards serving the enterprise market, those partners have been trained more on routing and switching technologies. Where they have traditionally sold products in the past, now they can have solutions discussions with their customers, he said.

"Now they're able to go to their customers and not talk about one product at a time, but talk about how they truly solve business problems," he said.