Should you construct a Leaf/Spine fabric with 10G or 40G? In this post I’ll make the simple observation that using 10G interfaces in your leaf/spine fabric scales to more servers than using 40G interfaces, all with the same hardware, bandwidth, and oversubscription. Let’s suppose you’ve decided to build a Leaf/Spine fabric for your data center [...]
Construct a Leaf Spine design with 40G or 10G? An observation in scaling the fabric.
January 25, 2012 By 22 Comments
On optimizing traffic for network virtualization
December 22, 2011 By 13 Comments
The era of network virtualization and software overlays is coming (read: VXLAN, OpenFlow, SDN, etc.) and with it the role of the physical network and what we define as “the network”, is all about to change. How does this change the way application flows map to traffic on the network and servers? How does this change [...]
Network Virtualization is like a big virtual chassis
October 12, 2011 By 20 Comments
This is something I’ve been chewing on for a while now and here’s my first rough attempt at writing it down: Network Virtualization is the new chassis switch, only much bigger. (and a lot less proprietary) The x86 server is the new Linecard The network switch is the new ASIC VXLAN (or NVGRE) is the new [...]
Understanding Hadoop Clusters and the Network
September 10, 2011 By 22 Comments
This article is Part 1 in series that will take a closer look at the architecture and methods of a Hadoop cluster, and how it relates to the network and server infrastructure. The content presented here is largely based on academic work and conversations I’ve had with customers running real production clusters. If you run production [...]
Recent Comments