Category: Podcast

In the last part of Clos Fabrics Explained webinar Brad Hedlund described how you can use Dell Fabric Manager to plan, design, configure and operate leaf-and-spine Clos fabric built with Dell Force10 switches. Should we call Dell Fabric Manager an SDN solution? Who cares, it sure is useful ;)

Like every recently designed fabric configuration/management platform, NEC ProgrammableFlow controller supports numerous configuration interfaces, including CLI, GUI, web-based configuration, REST API and OpenStack plugin. For more details, watch this part of the ProgrammableFlow Technical Deep Dive webinar.

Once you get rid of spanning tree and associated kludges (not too hard in OpenFlow-based networks), BUM flooding becomes your biggest enemy. NEC’s engineers implemented some interesting features in the ProgrammableFlow switches and controllers: rate-limiting of unknown unicast frames, flooding control, and ARP snooping (if only they’d go for ARP proxy).

OpenFlow is not exactly known for its quality-of-service features (hint: there are none), but as I described in the ProgrammableFlow Technical Deep Dive webinar NEC implemented numerous OpenFlow extensions in their edge switches and the ProgrammableFlow controller to give you a robust set of QoS features.

Virtual tenant networks are one of the best features of NEC ProgrammableFlow solution – you can build virtual layer-2 subnets (based on VLANs, edge ports or port/VLAN combos), connect them with a virtual router, and implement packet filters and traffic steering ... while treating the whole data center fabric as a single device.

Even better, the ingress edge switch performs all the operations you configure (ACLs, L2 lookup, L3 lookup, source/destination MAC rewrite), resulting in optimal end-to-end forwarding.

The ProgrammableFlow Principles of Operations section of the ProgrammableFlow Technical Deep Dive webinar generated tens of questions from the audience – it took us almost 20 minutes to answer all of them (note: you might watch the answers after watching the section that triggered the questions).

The second scenario Brad Hedlund described in the Clos Fabrics Explained webinar is a large leaf-and-spine fabric using 10GE uplinks and QSFP+ breakout cables between leaf and spine switches (thus increasing the number of spine switches to 16).

In the Clos Fabrics Explained webinar I focused on the Clos fabrics principles of operation and design options, and Brad Hedlund who graciously agreed to be my guest explained how you can use Dell Force10 switches to build them. In this video he’s describing a simple leaf-and-spine topology with 40GE uplinks.