In recent Software Gone Wild episodes we explored emerging routing protocols trying to address the specific needs of highly-meshed data center fabrics – RIFT and OpenFabric. In Episode 92 with Dinesh Dutt we decided to revisit the basics trying to answer a seemingly simple question: do we really need new routing protocols?

We quickly agreed that the question is moot for data centers with few hundred switches (or less), and that engineers building larger data centers hopefully know enough that they don’t need our advice and use scale-out architectures anyway… but of course we couldn’t stop there and I hope you’ll enjoy the rest of our discussion where we desperately tried to figure out what problem we’re trying to solve with new routing protocols.