Juniper's datacenter answer to Cisco: Stratus Project

Juniper said Tuesday it is partnering with server, storage, and software companies to develop a converged datacenter 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 datacenter 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.

[ Today, Juniper's main target, Cisco, joined with Accenture to launch a collaboration and datacenter virtualization effort. ]

Stratus is expected to support the CEE (Converged Enhanced Ethernet) datacenter 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 datacenter scaling "pain" due to latency, power, space, cost, and complexity, Yen said. It is also intended to support datacenter 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 datacenter migration strategies, Yen said.

"Stratus extends Juniper's high-performance networking core competencies into the datacenter," 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 datacenter."

Cisco is looking to transform datacenters 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 datacenter server stalwarts IBM and HP with the project.