Introducing data center fabric, the next-generation data center network to attend more data exchange for distribution of data request from enumerous media users




Introducing the fabric

For our next-generation data center network design we challenged ourselves to make the entire data center building one high-performance network, instead of a hierarchically oversubscribed system of clusters. We also wanted a clear and easy path for rapid network deployment and performance scalability without ripping out or customizing massive previous infrastructures every time we need to build more capacity.

To achieve this, we took a disaggregated approach: Instead of the large devices and clusters, we broke the network up into small identical units – server pods – and created uniform high-performance connectivity between all pods in the data center.

There is nothing particularly special about a pod – it’s just like a layer3 micro-cluster. The pod is not defined by any hard physical properties; it is simply a standard “unit of network” on our new fabric. Each pod is served by a set of four devices that we call fabric switches, maintaining the advantages of our current 3+1 four-post architecture for server rack TOR uplinks, and scalable beyond that if needed. Each TOR currently has 4 x 40G uplinks, providing 160G total bandwidth capacity for a rack of 10G-connected servers.



https://engineering.fb.com/2014/11/14/production-engineering/introducing-data-center-fabric-the-next-generation-facebook-data-center-network/

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