The hype around Juniper Networks’ QFabric architecture was pretty intensive when it launched last year: the concept of simplifying the networking and consolidating the different layers had, and still has a lot of appeal. And the company is looking to preserve the momentum as much as possible by the looks of it, now that it debuted a new edition that can be deployed in much smaller environments.

The QFX3000-G is essentially a scaled-down version of the original: Juniper says that it occupies 63 percent less space, reduces the number of cables by four and consumes 57 percent less power than alternative solutions.

This configuration features a number of other things as well. The QFX3600-I add-on solution is a scaling tool  that lets a customer to expand from  48 10GbE ports to a maximum of 6,144 10GbE ports, and Juniper claims that latency is reduced to only three microseconds.

The emphasis on simplification mentioned above has been extended today to include the firm’s Virtual Chassis powered EX8200 switches, too. These enable users to manage up to 4 data center cores as a single switch in both 1GbE and 10GbE deployments.

“We are seeing an increased interest from data center architects to ‘right-size’ their data center network. While a segment of the market requires massive scale, for most enterprises, dense, virtualized computing platforms are driving a requirement for smaller, higher performance form factors within the data network architecture,” says Mark Fabbi, Gartner VP.

Also this week, Juniper said it may buy back as much as one billion dollars worth of its stock – a massive extention to its $160 million repurchase plan from 2010.

A number of updates came out of the competition’s camp recently as well. One of the bigger developments at this week’s Cisco Live gathering was the deal with VCE to put the former’s load balancing solutions in Vblock.