Introduction to Data Center Fabrics

Before starting the Designing and Building Data Center Fabrics online course, let’s try to answer a seemingly simple question “what is a data center fabric?”

What services should your data center fabric provide? What requirements should you consider when designing it? This section lists a number of potential requirements and explains why they might be relevant to your design.

Data center fabrics often rely on technologies you might not find anywhere else in your network. This section describes those technologies and their impact on fabric design.

Traditional data center networks used a 3-tier design that was mostly mandated by hardware limitations, resulting in unequal bandwidth between endpoints based on their locations. In the last few years the networking industry rediscovered the work of Charles Clos (from 1953) and everyone started promoting leaf-and-spine fabrics.

After mastering the basic principles of leaf-and-spine fabrics described in the Introduction section we're moving on to the physical design: how do you build a leaf-and-spine fabric given number of edge ports and oversubscription ratio? What if you need less than 100 ports? What if you need 50.000 ports? What do you do if you have to support low-speed edge interfaces?

Understanding leaf-and-spine design rules is great. Being able to design large scalable fabrics is even better… but it turns out that after thorough infrastructure optimization many customers don't need more than two switches per data center.

This section describes the steps that will help you get the optimal infrastructure for a small- to mid-sized enterprise data center.

In this assignment you'll create the physical topology of a small data center fabric and select the switches used to implement it.

If you're not familiar with data center switches from major networking vendors, use the information from the Reference Materials part of this module.

This section contains recordings of Q&A and whiteboarding sessions from previous live courses. In these sessions we covered a wide range of topics, from pods and superspines to RIFT, OpenFabric and Segment Routing.

This section describes the differences between SDN, disaggregation and whitebox switching, the major components you'll find in any disaggregated solution (from hardware abstraction layer to control-plane components) and the benefits and drawbacks of several disaggregated network operating systems.

In this section you’ll find an overview of data center fabric solutions from major data center switching vendors. The Data Center Fabrics webinar (included with this course) contains even more information.

All webinars in this section are included with your online course. Some of them are part of the core course content, others are included as reference material.