What is the difference between a data center switch and a normal switch?

With the popularization of the Internet, the development of information technology, data center construction needs and standards are also constantly developing, so the data Center for network equipment requirements are gradually upgraded, ordinary switches are often unable to meet the needs of the data center.

Compared with common switches, data center switches need to have the features of high capacity, large cache, virtualization, FCOE, two-layer trill technology.

1. High-capacity equipment

The network traffic of data center has the characteristic of high density application dispatch, surge type burst buffer, and the common switch is to meet the interconnection and interworking as the main purpose, can not realize the accurate recognition and control of the business, can not do fast response and 0 lose package in the big business situation, cannot guarantee business continuity, The reliability of the system depends mainly on the reliability of the equipment. Therefore, the common switch can not meet the needs of the data center, the data center switch needs to have high capacity forwarding characteristics.

Data center switch must support Gaomi million card, that is, 48 million gigabit board, in order to enable 48 million Gigabit board can be forwarded across the line, data center switches can only use Clos distributed Exchange architecture. In addition, with the popularization of 40G and 100G, support 8-port 40G Board and 4-port 100G card is also gradually commercial, data center switch 40G, 100G board card has already appeared in the market to meet the needs of high density data center applications.

2. Large Cache Technology

The data center switch changes the port caching mode of the traditional switching system, adopts the distributed caching architecture, the cache is much larger than the ordinary switch, the cache capacity can reach above 1G, and the general switch can only reach 2~4m. For each port in the million-gigabit full speed conditions to achieve 200 milliseconds of burst traffic cache capability. Therefore, in the case of sudden flow, large cache can still guarantee network forwarding 0 packet loss, just adapt to the data center server large, burst traffic characteristics.

3. Virtualization Technology

Data Center network devices require high management and high security reliability, so data center switches also need to support virtualization, virtualization is to transform physical resources into logically manageable resources to break the barriers between the physical structure.

The virtualization of network equipment mainly includes many virtual one, one virtual technology, many virtual and many other technologies. Virtualization technology allows you to manage multiple network devices uniformly, or to completely isolate the business on a single device, reducing the cost of data center management by 40% and increasing it utilization by about 25%.

4.FCOE Technology

Traditional data centers often exist a data network and a storage network, and the new generation of data center network convergence Trend is more and more obvious, the advent of FCoE technology makes network fusion possible, FCOE is the storage network data frame encapsulated in the Ethernet frame for forwarding technology. The realization of this fusion technology is necessarily in the data center of the switch, ordinary switches generally do not support the FCoE function.

5.TRILL Technology

Data center in the construction of two-tier network, the original standard is STP protocol, but its shortcomings such as: STP is through the port block to work, all redundant links do not carry out data forwarding, resulting in a waste of bandwidth resources; STP whole net Only one spanning tree, the data message must pass through the root bridge to arrive, has affected the whole network forwarding efficiency. So STP will no longer be suitable for the expansion of the large data center, Trill is due to the STP of these defects and is generated for the application of the data center technology.

Trill protocol to the two-tier configuration and flexibility and three-tier integration and effective combination of scale, the sophomore layer does not need to configure the case, you can achieve the whole network without loop forwarding. The Trill technology is a two-layer basic feature of the data center switch, which is not available for ordinary switches.

Some of the above network technology is not available for ordinary switches, is the main data center switch technology, is a new generation of data centers, and even cloud data center services Network technology. With these new network technologies, the data center has been developed rapidly.