Data Center Fabrics Overview

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Building a new data center fabric? Trying to evaluate different vendors? Considering tighter integration with virtualization platforms or converged storage?

This vendor-independent workshop will:

• Give you an overview of data center fabric principles and common requirements;
• Describe typical data center fabric architectures and vendor-specific solutions implementing them;
• Identify benefits and drawbacks of common data center fabric architectures;

Topics Covered

The workshop focuses on these data center fabric requirements:

• End-to-end layer-2 and layer-3 transport;
• Converged storage requirements, including Data Center Bridging (DCB) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) support;
• Optimal transport with layer-2 and layer-3 multipathing;
• Redundant server connectivity with Multi-chassis Link Aggregation (MLAG);
• Virtualization awareness;
• Simplified provisioning and management.

The typical data center fabric architectures described in the workshop include:

• Independent management, control and data plane – Multi-chassis Link Aggregation (MLAG) solutions (Arista, Cumulus, Dell Force10) and large-scale bridging solutions from Brocade and Cisco;
• Centralized management, independent control and data planes – Cisco ACI, Brocade VCS Fabric.
• Centralized control plane, distributed data planes – Cisco VSS, HP IRF, Juniper Virtual Chassis and Virtual Chassis Fabric, OpenFlow-based solutions;
• Centralized data plane – Cisco port extender architectures.

Takeaways

After attending this workshop you'll be able to:

• Identify common data center fabric criteria and requirements;
• Evaluate vendor architectures and identify their benefits and drawbacks;
• Select the data center fabric solution meeting your requirements.

Who Should Attend

This workshop targets architects and designers who are planning, designing or building next-generation data centers. It will also help server, virtualization, security and networking engineers understand the limitations of data center fabrics and the options made available with the emerging software-defined technologies.

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