What is a data center fabric?

Data center fabrics of all kinds share another design goal. They provide a solid layer of connectivity in the physical network, and move the complexity of providing network virtualization, segmentation, stretched Ethernet segments, workload mobility, and other services to an overlay that rides on top of the fabric. The fabric itself, when paired with an overlay, is called the underlay.

What Problems Do Data Center Fabrics Solve?

As applications move from monolithic to disaggregated and microservices design patterns, traffic patterns in the data center move, too. They shift from north-south, between devices within and outside the data center, to east-west, between devices within the data center.

Organizations that move beyond monolithic applications also adopt an agile IT approach, where they deploy applications more quickly in smaller steps and respond to transport requirements that can change rapidly. Also, many organizations are moving to virtualized workloads, such as containers and virtual machines, to support rapid shifts in capacity over time on a smaller set of physical servers.

Traditional hierarchical data center network designs aren’t well suited to support these requirements. So, many organizations are replacing their hierarchical networks with flatter, more agile data center fabrics.

How Does a Data Center Fabric Work?

Modern data center fabrics typically use a two-tier spine-and-leaf architecture, also known as a Clos fabric. In this fabric there are typically three stages, as data passes through three devices to reach its destination. For example, east-west data center traffic typically travels upstream from a given server through a leaf device to a spine device, and then downstream through another leaf device to the destination sever.

In a fabric design, there isn’t a network core, which changes the fundamental nature of the network itself.

• While intelligence can be moved to the core of a traditional hierarchical network (for instance, to implement policy), the intelligence in a spine-and-leaf fabric is moved to the edge. It’s implemented either in leaf devices (such as top-of-rack, or ToR, switches) or in endpoint devices connected to the fabric (the workloads). The spine devices merely act as a transit layer for the leaf devices.
• Spine-and-leaf fabrics easily accommodate places in the network where east-west traffic flows make sense, which isn't the case in a traditional hierarchical design.
• All traffic in a spine-and-leaf fabric—east-west or north-south—becomes equal. It’s processed by the same number of devices. This practice greatly aids in building fabrics with strict delay and jitter requirements.

The scale of a spine-and-leaf fabric is constrained by the number of available ports.

On the leaf devices:

• Downstream ports available to connect endpoints
• Upstream ports available to connect to spine devices

On the spine devices:

• Downstream ports available to connect to leaf devices

However, adding capacity to a spine-and-leaf fabric is easy. You simply add more spine or leaf devices as needed alongside the existing devices. This approach allows a spine-and-leaf fabric to “scale out” in the same way servers and services do—by adding more devices in parallel. This contrasts to “scaling up” by adding more capacity in existing devices, as in a traditional hierarchical design.

Beyond increasing port capacity, you can also increase overall fabric scalability by creating multiple spine-and-leaf fabric pods and interconnecting them with an additional spine-like layer.

This pod-based design has advantages in large-scale data center fabrics.

• Provides for building very large fabrics using a single device type throughout the network (a single SKU design)
• Enables generational management of hardware and software over time
• Makes it easy to steer traffic using technologies such as segment routing

Juniper Networks Implementation

Juniper’s data center fabric solutions include two main components.

• Juniper switches provide the high-performance, high-density platforms required to build innovative data center fabrics that scale to thousands of ports.
• Juniper’s joint solution with Apstra enables you to easily manage your physical data center infrastructure. Apstra AOS enables you to automate, manage, and monitor your data center fabric — simplifying operations for Day 0 and beyond.

These solutions accommodate physical and virtualized infrastructures, enable simplified management, and perfectly meet the requirements of virtualization, cloud computing, and big data.