Juniper Aims QFabric at Midmarket

Following the lead of other vendors shifting more of their focus into the midmarket space, Juniper Networks (NASDAQ: JNPR) has designed a version of its QFabric networking technology aimed at what the company calls the “sweet spot” of customers.

For VARs and solution providers selling into the midmarket, the QFX3000-M offers the same capabilities of its big brother, the QFX3000-G, but in a chassis that fits well into space-constrained environments such as co-location containers or satellite data centers. According to Juniper, the QFX3000-M provides four times the performance, occupies 63 percent less space, uses 74 percent fewer cables and consumes 57 percent less power than competitive solutions.

“With the 3000-G we had a limited number of partners who could sell and support it,” said Dhritiman Dasgupta, senior director of Enterprise System and Routing at Juniper. “The 3000-M broadens the opportunity for our channel; in fact, they’re now calling it, ‘their version.’”

Along with the QFX3000-M, Juniper also announced enhancements to its EX8200 switches running Virtual Chassis technology to enable users to manage up to four data center cores as a single switch. “We’ve added to out software where in past users could have two switches behave as one, but now can have eight switches in different locations and be able to manage them as one,” Dasgupta said.

Denise Shiffman, vice president of Marketing for Enterprise Systems, noted Juniper is making moves to help its channel partners offer the QFabric technologies in the midmarket. “We have 450 global and elite partners qualified to sell into data center, and of those, 80 are data center specialist partners. Those will be the earliest partners for this,” she said, [and] we are giving them a lot of training, considering an extension of the Juniper family, and providing installation and design services. We really want to make sure for the first few customer deployments we work hand in hand and make them really successful.”

Juniper also has a data center specialist organization “that is an overlay to our sales organization and is responsible for working with our channel partners and supporting them in the field,” Shiffman said, helping partners in all manner of data center deployment issues.

The new technologies are on the price list today and will be available by the end of June, according to the company.