Example: Multi-Stage Clos Fabrics

Smaller Clos fabrics are built with two layers of switches: leaf and spine switches. The oversubscription ratio you want to achieve dictates the number of uplinks on the leaf switch, which in turn dictates the maximum number of spine switches and thus the fabric size.

You have to use multi-stage Clos architecture if you want to build bigger fabrics; Brad Hedlund described a sample fabric with over 24.000 server-facing ports in the Clos Fabrics Explained webinar.

Watch the video

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4 comments:

  1. Marc Abel 01 March 2013 05:26
    How can you support 128 spine switches if most routing protocols only provide 8 or 16 max paths? This is a big disconnect in my understand of Clos fabric implementations.
  2. Ivan Pepelnjak 01 March 2013 07:45
    Why would you need 128 spine switches? You can have as many spine switches as you have uplinks on leaf switches - and many DC switches support 32-way ECMP.
  3. Marc Abel 01 March 2013 08:41
    In the video he show 64 stage 3 spine switches connected to 128 stage 2 spine switches. That is the part I don't understand. Even if as you say they can support 32-way ECMP (which vendors support this?), that still doesn't account for that many switches.
  4. pH 06 March 2013 11:02
    Hi Ivan, I don't get the math either. At leaf switches (stage 2), you have 4*40GE southbound, towards the access (ToR); as the fabric should be non-blocking, you need the same capacity northbound (to stage 3 - spine). So you can use either 4*40GE (4 spine switches/32 leaf switches) or, to support more leaf switches, 16*10GE (16*spine/128 leaf). Why are there 64 spine switches in the presentation?
    Thanks for the explanation.
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