They saw how the hyperscale data centers evolved using bare metal and wanted to get in on the act. The idea behind it is to bring disaggregation, whitebox economics, and open source standards and software to the carrier industry (more information on carrier industry here).
The Open Networking Foundation has been working on the CORD (central office rearchitected as a data centre) project since 2016. The idea of this networking fabric is not limited to the traditional data center either. This results in the internal traffic within the data center being extremely low latency and highly efficient. The traffic is transmitted between the servers by traversing the leaf and spine switches, which means servers are often only 1 switch hop away from each other. The leaves in this scenario can also be called ToR (top-of-rack) switches. The data center fabric usually has 1 or 2 tiers of switches, the most common being the 2-tier spine and leaf architecture or Clos as it is also known. Each individual server can reach every other server using this fabric, thus, eliminating the issues caused by increased east-west traffic. As the size of the data center increases so too does the matrix of connections. The connections take on a woven, crisscross appearance, hence the term fabric. What is a data center fabric?Ī data center fabric can be described as the layout of how the connections are made between the switches and the servers. Let’s delve a little deeper and look at what a fabric really is, the hardware and software involved and some implementation options. ResearchAndMarkets recently forecast a CAGR of 24.5% for the fabric market for the period 2019-2024 and that looks remarkably on the safe side. The data center fabric architecture has been designed to deal with the proliferation of east-west traffic, the general explosion in the volume and scale of data, the ability to consolidate network, compute and storage resources, spiralling costs associated with vendor lock-in and much more. With east-west traffic now dominating the majority of data centre traffic, a new approach to network architecture was imperative. Legacy, multi-tiered data center architectures, originally designed for north-south traffic, have been pushed to breaking point with cloud computing, big data, virtualization and more.
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