Ethernet fabric: a necessary stage in data centre evolution

Overview

As data centres evolve to enable a world where information and applications can move anywhere in the cloud, classic Ethernet with its hierarchical architecture also has to change.

Today, data centre networks carry traffic for a diverse set of applications including client/server, Web services, and unified communications—each with different traffic patterns and network service requirements. Applications are increasingly deployed within virtual machines hosted on server clusters.

This paper explains why traditional data centre networks are struggling to cope with this modern environment, and how a move to a flatter, less hierarchical structure can ease the bottlenecks.

Areas covered:
•Limitations of classic Ethernet
•Enhancements to Ethernet
•The Ethernet fabric architecture