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Leaf and spine Te larger data centre operators use a flatter, two-tier switching architecture known as leaf and spine. ‘Te flatter switching architectures require larger quantities of economical links between the leaf and spine switches,’ said Dale Murray, principal analyst at market research firm, LightCounting. A ‘leaf’ can be a top-of-rack switch that connects
servers to the larger-capacity ‘spine’ switches. Enterprises still commonly use the traditional three-tier architecture comprising top-of-rack, aggregation and core switches. But the larger enterprises are also adopting the
leaf-spine architecture for the same reasons as the hyper-scale data centre operators: its efficiency in coping with the much greater traffic flows across a switching tier due to server virtualisation and newer applications rather than up and down the switching tiers associated with traditional applications. In enterprises, the server blade
interface to the top-of-rack switch is only now transitioning from one to 10 Gig, while the connection between the leaf and spine switches is at 40 Gig. Te larger data centre operators already use 10-Gig server blades and they want 100-Gig links to connect their spine switches to an edge router, or to a network backbone – another tier of high-performance 100-Gig switches connecting the spine to other sections in the data centre hosting leaf-spines. Meanwhile, the most demanding hyper-scale
data centre operators want to connect their leaf and spine switches with 100 Gig now, says Hull. What is holding the operators up is the lack of high-port- count, 100-Gig switches and accompanying, moderately priced 100-Gig optical modules. Te issue of high port-density 100-Gig switches
is now being addressed. Both Arista and Mellanox have announced recently their first 100-Gigabit switches that support the compact QSFP28 transceiver. Meanwhile, optical module makers are
Issue 5 • Autumn 2014 FIBRE SYSTEMS 29
The most demanding hyper-scale data centre operators want to connect their leaf and spine switches with 100 Gig now
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