Spirent puts performance and scale of Juniper Networks’ QFabric to the test

Network Test has completed the industry’s first public 1536 port 10 G ethernet test of QFabric, Juniper Networks’ data centre network fabric, using Spirent's HyperMetrics dX test module. This independent test reflects real-world data centre set-ups, with millions of application flows between any set of ports, and has important implications for cloud computing, storage and financial applications such as high-frequency trading and big data analytics.

Today’s data centres are growing rapidly in scale, with increasing numbers of physical and virtual servers. This results in the need for high-density, high-speed, fabric-based networks with terabits of any-to-any port traffic. For these increasingly large-scale data centres, it is imperative to understand how the network fabric will perform under stress, with latency-sensitive traffic running over it.

Network Test worked with Spirent and Juniper Networks on an innovative methodology to test QFabric’s performance at massive scale, under the most stressful, yet realistic conditions. The results allow Juniper Networks to confidently address the scalability, performance and latency needs of increasingly large data centres. With a port density more than four times greater than any previous public test of its kind, this effort involved 1536 10 G ethernet ports, measuring nanosecond latency at terabits per second.

“As data centre networks evolve and demand for fabrics rises, this independent test demonstrates the performance scalability and interoperability benefits a true fabric system can deliver to help customers solve the problems associated with growing data needs,” said RK Anand, executive vice president and general manager, Data Centre Business Unit, Juniper Networks. “Spirent’s test equipment enabled the validation and demonstration of these benefits at large scale.”

Spirent enabled Juniper Networks to conduct the high-performance, low-latency testing necessary to assess and understand any-to-any connectivity, with the most stressful application traffic flows data centre fabrics will encounter.

Using the Spirent HyperMetrics dX test module, Juniper was able to scale traffic to over a trillion bytes and billion frames per second, measuring nanosecond latency on more than 2.3 million paths in full mesh. This enables data centres deploying QFabric to fully characterise system performance and verify predictability when deployed in large mission-critical environments.