Emerging Data Center Network Structure

Emerging Data Center Network Structure

First, the deployment personnel should be familiar with the topology of various networks, list the topology structures suitable for their own networks, and then filter them one by one.

No network structure is applicable to all enterprises or companies. As a technician, you must first be familiar with the network topology, such as using a gigabit or 10-Gigabit Backbone Network Based on your budget. This will help you solve network technical difficulties.

What is the most important in the network topology of a data center?

Currently, the main network topology of most data centers is built based on the layer-3 protocol. A typical structure is to connect Second-level switches or other network devices through a core switch, including the user layer and convergence layer of the external network and internal network.

The leaf node (connection device or server) and spine node (connection switch) are the most important and obvious parts of the data center network topology, referred to as leaf-spine. As the number of vswitch devices increases, this structure will cause transmission bottlenecks. For example, the data traffic of the network in the storage area will be affected by the increase of vswitch nodes.

New Network Topology

The new network topology design is a topology of a dedicated channel. The specific application uses a dedicated network channel. This Topology Design theoretically takes into account that the devices in the network can freely move their physical locations, in addition, it inherits the characteristics of switch data forwarding in the traditional network topology. Although the current mainstream networks do not seem to be able to use these technologies, the maturity of emerging technologies always takes time to verify, maybe not now, but as a technology of the next generation, there will be a lot of room for development in the future.

There are also some other new network topologies that have been formed. These emerging architectures have gone beyond the traditional three-tier network leaf-spine topology. Although these network structures are rare. Most of these network structures are used in data centers in special fields.

Multi-layer leaf-spine Network TopologyIt is very close to the baseline of the network topology. Many large networks use vertical deployment methods to expand networks, such as VLANs.

Hypercube network topology.A simple 3D Hypercube structure is like a three-dimensional network composed of six planes. Each connection point is composed of a switch. A 4D Hypercube Network (like a hyper-cube) is like a 3D Hypercube network located in another 3D Hypercube. Two internal and external networks are connected to each other through corner nodes, the device node is connected to the outer network. To implement such a network structure, you need to understand your own needs and budget, and understand in detail the characteristics of this network structure.

Toroidal ring network topology.This structure actually refers to any ring network topology. A 3D ring topology is a highly structured network ring. The ring network structure is usually used in a high-performance computing environment, and may depend on the interconnection nodes between switches for computing.

Jellyfish network topology.It sounds like a strange name, but it does. The main characteristic of this network structure is that it is a type of random network, and the switches of this network structure are interconnected according to the design of the network designer. The design of this network topology can increase or even 25% of the data capacity compared with the traditional structure.

DCell network topology.In this structure, the servers in the network have multiple NICs. Some NICs connect to each other's servers, and the server is like a cell in a large network environment. DCell generally requires four or more NICs per server.

FiConn network topology.In a FiConn structure similar to DCell, each server is interconnected with another server to form a cell node, but only two NICs are required.

BCube network topology.Similar to DCell, FiConn, and BCube, these ports are directly connected using additional server ports, which are deployed for modular networks. Microsoft promotes the BCube network topology and establishes the BCube source routing protocol to manage the network data center topology.

The network topology of CamCube.This topology aims to optimize data transmission across the entire ring. It is used for cluster host interconnection and is built on Microsoft's CamCubeOS. The traditional network management method does not work in this network structure.

Butterfly network topology.Google's flat butterfly structure is a specific network structure, similar to a chessboard. In this network structure, any node can be used as a switch, and the node controls the traffic. This type of network aims to reduce power consumption and make it environmentally friendly.