Juniper: Carrier Business Models Are Broken

This week, Juniper Networks announced a slew of new products, services and partnerships designed to steal market share from data centre networking market leader Cisco.

At an EMEA press summit in Barcelona, Juniper’s chairman, chief technical officer and founder, Pradeep Sindhu, spoke about the company’s new network for data centres, which he claims will solve the “real problems” facing the industry today.

“We believe that the business models of carriers are broken. They are broken because costs are threatening to become larger than the revenues, and that does not make for a successful business model,” said Sindhu.

“We’re going to solve that problem by developing universal infrastructure that is application-independent. We’re going to develop an open software ecosystem for which not only Juniper but our partners and third parties and our customers can write software.

“By addressing both the cost side of the equation and the revenue side of the equation by injecting innovation into the ecosystem, that’s the way that we believe that we are differentiated,” he added.

Flattening the network

Central to Juniper’s strategy is its new “3-2-1” data centre network architecture, which will allow customers to flatten and simplify legacy data centre networks, going from three layers to two using Juniper’s Virtual Chassis fabric, and eventually going to just one layer, with Juniper’s “Project Stratus” fabric, due to launch some time in 2011.

“The network is a one-tier network in the sense that the decision about forwarding is made at one point, at the entry of the network. As opposed to in the classical 3-tier network, where it is made at 5 points,” said Sindhu.

“The connectivity looks like it’s a full mesh, but physically it’s not a full mesh. Physically it’s more like a multi-stage network. Multi-stage networks have been well known for some time in high-performance computing.”

As part of its move towards this single tier network, Juniper has drawn up a data centre roadmap that converges networks in order to overcome the old network approach of adding more boxes to boost performance.

“The main issue today in the data centres and in the wide-area network is how do you build infrastructure in a cost-effective way? How do you enable modern applications? How do you enable cloud computing? It is not about just distribution channels and large-scale presence,” said Sindhu.

“The only way to think about it going forward is that you have a single network, a single infrastructure. This whole world of separating applications into data and voice, it’s legacy thinking, and this is part of the reason that we are in the trouble we are.”