Data Center Fabrics

Data Center Fabric Architectures

Webinar: 4.70 Instructor: 4.84 Materials: 4.78 more …

This webinar describes the basics of Data Center fabric architectures offered by numerous vendors including Alcatel Lucent, Arista Networks, Avaya, Brocade, Cisco, Force10 Networks, HP and Juniper.

Regular update sessions describe the progress individual vendors made since the initial webinar was released (check also the list of webinar videos and materials).

Contents

The initial webinar focused on vendor-specific fabric architectures and classified them based on control and data plane position within the fabric into the following major groups:

• Independent management, control and data plane – Multi-chassis Link Aggregation (MLAG) and large-scale bridging solutions from ALU, Arista, Avaya, Brocade, Cisco and Force10.
• Centralized management, independent control and data planes – Cisco’s UCS Manager, Juniper’s Virtual Chassis and QFabric.
• Centralized control plane, distributed data planes - Cisco’s VSS, HP’s IRF, Juniper’s XRE.
• Centralized data plane – Port extender architectures
• Per-flow data plane setup – OpenFlow
• Controller-based networking - Plexxi

The webinar also described how well each individual solution fulfills the following criteria:

• Layer 2 and Layer 3 multipathing;
• Multi-chassis Link Aggregation (MLAG);
• Virtualization awareness;
• Data Center Bridging (DCB) support;
• Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) support;
• Simplified provisioning and management.

May 2013 update session

The special guest star - Dan Backman, solution architect @ Plexxi - will describe Plexxi's approach to scale-out data center fabrics and controller-based data center networking (more about Dan).

Other highlights of this update session include new data center switches from Cisco (Nexus 6000) and Juniper (EX 9200).

November 2012 update session

The update session described hardware and software advances made since May 2012:

• Arista 7150 series switches and new EOS features in releases up to 4.10.3
• Brocade VDX 8770 switch and new features in Network OS 3.0
• Cisco Nexus 7000 additions, Nexus 3548, port extenders overview and new features in Nexus OS
• Juniper QFabric (QFX3000-M) and new Junos 12.2 features

May 2012 update session

The update session focused on the following products/architectures:

• Cisco Nexus series
• HP Intelligent Resilient Framework
• Juniper Virtual Chassis

The session described solutions from nine major vendors: Alcatel Lucent, Arista, Avaya, Brocade (VDX series only), Cisco (Nexus series only), Dell Force 10, HP, Juniper and NEC.

In addition to the detailed product data for each individual vendor, four new criteria were added to the solution scorecards:

• Optimum Layer 3 forwarding across the fabric;
• Layer 3 path isolation (based on MPLS/VPN or VRF-like multiple routing tables);
• IPv6 support;
• Hardware tables sizes (MAC, IPv4, IPv6, IP multicast, ARP and ND).

Target Audience

This webinar is ideal for IT managers and networking engineers that have to look behind the vendor marketectures to understand the benefits and drawbacks of individual data center solutions.

If you are a network architect, designer or sales/support engineer working in data center environment, you simply have to attend this webinar.

Delivery Format

The Data Center Fabric Architectures is a 3 hour technical presentation. You can register for the on-line webinar immediately; we can also organize an on-site event, where the topics of this presentation are combined with in-depth discussion of other Data Center networking topics that apply to your network.

When attending the on-line webinar, you’ll get a PDF copy of the presentation materials at least a week before the webinar, giving you plenty of time to study the materials and prepare potential questions. The WebEx classroom instructions will be available two days before the event.

After the on-line webinar, you’ll get access to WebEx recording of the webinar that you’ll be able to watch as many times as desired.

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