While all major network vendors talk about the inevitable transition to a flat network fabric in data centers, Juniper believes it is the only one that has a true fabric in the making that will finally kill the Spanning Tree. With Project Stratus, the company is developing a solution that it says will make the entire data center network behave like a single switch.

Juniper believes the future one-layer network – as opposed to a traditional one that consists of access, aggregation and core layers – will be the ultimate solution to the manageability and performance problems associated with the large scale next-generation data center networks have to reach in order to adequately support the amount of traffic they have to serve as data centers become large shared resource pools.

“Ten years from now, all new data center networks will look like a fabric,” Andy Ingram, Juniper’s VP of product marketing and business development for fabric and switching technologies, said. Resource pooling, also known as cloud computing, is the key driver in this transition and current Spanning Tree architectures are not up to task, according to him.

In an address at an event for press and analysts in San Jose, California, Thursday, Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson pointed out that as the volume of traffic in a network grows, the amount of storage and servers grows linearly. Growth in the amount of switching gear, however, grows on a steep curve.

“Every time you double the number of storage and servers in the data center, you have to quadruple the number of switch boards,” Johnson said. “That means the complexity is growing exponentially.” Today’s data center operators are under pressure to improve performance, user experience and reliability while being scalable and controlling cost. “You can solve all of these problems by fundamentally simplifying the data center network,” Ingram said.

At this point Juniper is keeping details of the solution to itself, but Ingram says it will be one large access switch that consists of multiple physical devices, where every port is connected to every other port. It will connect all devices in the data center into a fabric that will run Juniper’s Junos operating system and will be managed through a single control interface. Stratus will be scaled in a modular fashion.

Juniper expects to deploy Stratus in customer trials by early 2011.