I had noted in my blog on Juniper’s SDN announcement yesterday that we had covered the Juniper QFabric launch in early 2011 and had written an article on QFabric, the PTX, and its potential value in the cloud. The article included comments on the potential for “service chains” similar to that offered in Juniper’s SDN presentation. Readers of our premium blog were given a copy of that issue, and I was asked by some readers of this public blog if they could have at least a copy of that article. I attach it below. This can be distributed freely but may not be altered in any way or used in any commercial activity without our express written consent.
This is not intended to infer that I believe I had any role in “inventing” the service chain concept. The comments I made came out of questions I asked to Pradeep Sindhu, Juniper’s CTO, at the analyst briefing before the public announcement. It was my view that service chaining was intended as a QFabric feature because it was a feature of the basic ASICs. I believe that the semiconductor presentation at the Juniper Partner Event yesterday suggested that was true as well. My goal is simply to say that this concept is an asset that could have been developed years ago, and had it been it might have lead the market’s conception of both NFV (which is where service chaining really fits now) and SDN. Thus, this piece speaks to the value of positioning, something I’ve been preaching to all network companies.