Select the Best Switching ASIC For the Job

Last week I described some of the data center switching ASIC design tradeoffs and the ASIC families Broadcom created to fit somewhere in that multi-dimensional space.

Next step: how could you design your data center fabric to make the most out of them? To keep things simple, we’ll build a typical leaf-and-spine fabric with a WAN edge layer (sometimes called border leaf switches).

Spine switches should be significantly faster than the leaf switches – in a typical leaf-and-spine fabric, you’d use two or four spine switches to connect up to 32 (or 64) leaf switches. You probably don’t want to spend an arm and a leg for a spine switch; high-performance switches should therefore have:

  • Small buffers
  • Small forwarding tables
  • Minimum forwarding complexity – nothing else but rudimentary L2 and L3 forwarding with a sprinkle of course-grained QoS

Not surprisingly, the Broadcom Tomahawk series fits the bill perfectly, but you have to be careful in your design:

  • You might experience scaling challenges when using this ASIC in a traditional layer-2 fabric due to its small MAC/ARP forwarding tables1. Build a routed data center fabric, and implement stretched VLANs with VXLAN transport between edge switches or hypervisors.
  • The same ASIC supports relatively large IPv4/IPv6 forwarding tables2, making it a perfect fit for a core switch in a routed fabric.
  • We chose spine switches with small buffers to reduce cost. Don’t even think about connecting anything else but leaf switches to them unless you want to live in a world of eternal drop-caused pain.

Leaf switches might need slightly larger buffers, larger MAC/ARP forwarding tables3, and more complex packet forwarding functionality (example: VXLAN routing). A data center switch using a Broadcom Trident-series ASIC is usually a perfect fit.

Leaf switches dealing with a significant amount of incast traffic4 might need significantly larger buffers. Typical scenarios include:

  • WAN edge
  • Applications with scatter-gather behavior (example: Map/Reduce)
  • Many hosts writing to the same iSCSI target

Use a deep buffer switch in those few scenarios – they tend to be horrendously expensive but still cheaper (per gigabit) than WAN edge routers.

Please note that you usually DO NOT need a deep buffer leaf switch (or deep buffers on spine switches) outside of these few scenarios. For more details explore:

Next: Beware of Vendors Bringing White Papers Continue


  1. 8K MAC table and 16K ARP table according to an Arista datasheet ↩︎

  2. 640K IPv4 longest-prefix-match (LPM) routes or 160K IPv6 LPM routes according to the same datasheet ↩︎

  3. In particular, when you plan to connect containers straight to the data center fabric. ↩︎

  4. Traffic sent from many sources to one or more destinations connected to the same link ↩︎

Blog posts in Data Center Switching ASICs series

1 comments:

  1. The best and the most concise Switch selection strategy I've ever seen.

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