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 17 Comments
On “Why TRILL wont work for the data center”
June 15, 2011 By 24 Comments
Today I came across “Why TRILL won’t work for data center network architecture” by Anjan Venkatramani of Juniper. Anjan’s article makes a few myopic and flawed arguments in slamming TRILL, setting up a sale for QFabric. The stated problems with TRILL include FCoE, L3 multi-pathing, VLAN scale, and large failure domains. The one and only Ivan Pepelnjak has already tackled the [...]
“Jawbreaker”, merchant silicon, QFabric, and flat networks
June 10, 2011 By 4 Comments
Brad, can you elaborate on Cisco’s Jawbreaker project? What exactly is it? Is it a response to Juniper’s Q-Fabric? Is it an attempt to rectify the inconsistencies in the differing purpose-built approaches of the N7K and N5K? Why create a new architecture? It seems like Cisco is really in trouble – creating a new architecture, [...]
Setting the stage for TRILL, rethinking data center switching
May 7, 2010 By 44 Comments
As data centers become increasingly dynamic and dense with virtualization – how the classic Ethernet switching design adopts to these new models and scales becomes an important and challenging question. Virtualization and cloud based services says that any workload can exist anywhere, at anytime, on demand, and move to any location without disruption. This is [...]
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