[j-nsp] Qfabric

Thu Feb 24 10:03:30 EST 2011

Chris,

No offense, but you are dead wrong on this issue.  I come in contact with
organizations every single day who have mission critical data requirements
and latency is a VERY big requirement for many of these organizations.  And
while this might not be your experience given the financial services
organization you work with, reduced latency was a key enabler/differentiator
for the NYSE and one of the main reasons that they chose Juniper for their
next-generation data centers.

I am pretty sure there are a lot of others who would agree with me that
latency is more than just a "buzz" word.

Stefan Fouant, CISSP, JNCIEx2
 <http://www.shortestpathfirst.net/> www.shortestpathfirst.net
GPG Key ID: 0xB4C956EC

From: Chris Evans [mailto:chrisccnpspam2 at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2011 11:55 PM
To: Stefan Fouant
Cc: Juniper-Nsp List; Ben Dale
Subject: Re: [j-nsp] Qfabric

Low latency is a buzz word. Who really needs it? Very few applications
really need it. I work in the financial industry and the only place we have
a use case for low latency is in the investment bank context.. its like 20
switches out of the thousands we have. retail, treasury, card etc. Couldnt
care. 

Also keep in mind that Juniper is one of the last to meet the low latency
game.They are talking the game finally and people are buying into it.
Everyone else is or has already  built lower latency switches than even
these boxes already using the same merchant silicon. 

All in all I sure hope juniper gets this one right. The ex platforms still
have a lot of catching up to do just to match Cisco and  brocade features..
I don't care about latency I care about the features that I need to run my
business. 

On Feb 23, 2011 10:11 PM, "Stefan Fouant" <sfouant at shortestpathfirst.net>
wrote:
> Remember, a key differentiator is that TRILL solutions still require
> forwarding table lookups on each node; as such, end-to-end latencies are
> much higher.
> 
> Another thing to point out is that QFabric allows exponential scaling in
> that each device added to the fabric contributes additional switching
> capacity, whereby we can achieve n^2 scaling benefits. It is interesting
to
> see the n-squared problem turned on its head - usually meshes are complex
> and cumbersome - here, it only makes things better :)
> 
> Stefan Fouant, CISSP, JNCIEx2
> www.shortestpathfirst.net
> GPG Key ID: 0xB4C956EC
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: juniper-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net [mailto:juniper-nsp-
>> bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Ben Dale
>> Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2011 9:41 PM
>> To: Juniper-Nsp List
>> Subject: Re: [j-nsp] Qfabric
>> 
>> My understanding of the Brocade VDX is that they use their own
>> proprietary flavour of TRILL in order to handle the management of the
>> switches? Happy for someone to correct me on this though.
>> 
>> As Stefan pointed out - where the TRILL-based solutions fall down is
>> controlling oversubscription - for every customer-facing revenue port,
>> you need uplink(s) of equal capacity on *every* switch between point A
>> and point B, which gets a bit hairy when your customer wants 10GB.
>> 
>> Even on it's own though, the QFX looks like a pretty sweet box, but I
>> don't think I've ever seen a Juniper Data Sheet with as many roadmap
>> asterisks ; )
>> 
>> It'll be interesting to see if Juniper offer a half-sized QFabric down
>> the road once they realise that not everyone wants / needs 128x 40GB
>> attached switches
>> 
>> Interesting times!
>> 
>> On 24/02/2011, at 12:11 PM, Keegan Holley wrote:
>> 
>> > I think Brocade released nearly the same technology a couple of
>> months ago
>> > in their VDX product. Cisco can't be far behind. Although, their
>> solution
>> > will most likely be proprietary. As far as the technology I think
>> > spanning-tree and the current way of doing ethernet has not been
>> ideal for
>> > some time.
>> >
>> >
>> > On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 9:04 PM, Stefan Fouant <
>> > sfouant at shortestpathfirst.net> wrote:
>> >
>> >> It's more than just a competitive offering to compete with the likes
>> of the
>> >> Nexus switches from Cisco, and its also quite a bit different from
>> Cisco's
>> >> FabricPath or other similar TRILL offerings. With FabricPath and
>> TRILL we
>> >> solve the problem of wasted revenue ports associated with complex 3-
>> Tier
>> >> architectures and blocked Spanning Tree ports, but you still have a
>> >> forwarding table lookup taking place on each node along the path.
>> With
>> >> QFabric we have a set of devices which combine to form a singular
>> unified
>> >> fabric, all sharing a single control plane and managed via a single
>> pane of
>> >> glass, but more importantly achieving reduced latency as a result of
>> a
>> >> single forwarding table lookup taking place on the ingress node.
>> With such a
>> >> configuration we can achieve end-to-end Data Center latency on the
>> order of
>> >> 5 microseconds.
>> >>
>> >> There is a lot more to it which is obviously covered in the
>> whitepapers,
>> >> but this is truly something which is going to revolutionize data
>> centers as
>> >> we know it for some time to come.
>> >>
>> >> Stefan Fouant, CISSP, JNCIEx2
>> >> GPG Key ID: 0xB4C956EC
>> >>
>> >> Sent from my HTC EVO.
>> >>
>> >> ----- Reply message -----
>> >> From: "Chris Evans" <chrisccnpspam2 at gmail.com>
>> >> Date: Wed, Feb 23, 2011 7:28 pm
>> >> Subject: [j-nsp] Qfabric
>> >> To: "Keegan Holley" <keegan.holley at sungard.com>
>> >> Cc: "juniper-nsp" <juniper-nsp at puck.nether.net>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> Its junipers answer to nexus 5k 2k soltuion with larger scalability
>> >> essentially.
>> >> It has a big fabric interconnect at the core and some routing
>> engines that
>> >> control edge switches acting like remote line cards.
>> >>
>> >> On Feb 23, 2011 7:23 PM, "Keegan Holley" <keegan.holley at sungard.com>
>> >> wrote:
>> >>> Does anyone know what Qfabric is yet? After the video where Pradeep
>> >> Sindhu
>> >>> spends 1:45 talking about how they are going to change the world
>> and 0:45
>> >>> talking about the technology I gave up trying to cut through the
>> >> marketing
>> >>> buffer. It sounds like their implementation or answer to trill with
>> some
>> >> of
>> >>> the virtual chassis stuff you see from the nexus thrown in. Anyone
>> else
>> >> get
>> >>> more than that?
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