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The Virtual Datacenter

White Paper: FocalPoint Switches in the Datacenter (PDF)

Using FocalPoint in the Datacenter

The advanced features available in the FocalPoint switch family help datacenter designers cope with the problems of scalability, space, power and cost as they evolve to meet increasing demands for applications such as networking, storage and computation. Efficient scaling implies not only scaling in terms of bandwidth, but scaling that is cost effective, easily implemented, and that allows the deployment of added bandwidth with an appropriate level of granularity.

FocalPoint switches provide this scalability with up to 24 ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. If higher bandwidth connections are needed, Ethernet’s native Link Aggregation Protocol can be used to aggregate multiple 10 Gigabit ports into a single, higher bandwidth pipe of up to 160Gb/s. With FocalPoint, link aggregation can be done even across multiple switches in a multi-stage topology such as a fat tree or stack while maintaining non-blocking operation.

The figure below shows an example datacenter switch with up to 288 10G user ports using non-blocking (Clos) architecture known as a Fat Tree. Each FM4224 device located on a line card connects to 12 user ports and also connects through the passive backplane to all 12 switch card FM4224 devices known as Spine Switches. Traffic is automatically load balanced across these Spine Switches creating and effective 120G data pipe. If a Spine Switch or switch card fails, data can be automatically load balanced around the failed devices providing N+1 redundancy. By using standard Ethernet switching throughout the fabric, scalability is achieved that is more cost, space and power effective than the standard “Big Iron” approach.

Network Virtualization

Network Virtualization allows flexible deployment of network resources. FocalPoint switches enable effective network partitioning through extensive 802.1Q Virtual LAN (VLAN) and stacked VLAN (“Q-in-Q”) support. This IEEE standard protocol enables the partitioning of a single physical switch into two or more virtual switches, and can also be used to create logical workgroups that span two or more physical switches. FocalPoint switches support the creation of up to 4096 simultaneous VLAN’s. Network partitioning can also be implemented through the segmentation of FocalPoint memory buffer space, essentially creating two smaller switch domains with a single switch.

Communications between VLAN’s occur via Layer 3 routing, and FocalPoint FM4000 devices provide up to 16,000 IPv4 routes and up to 4,000 IPv6 routes for a robust, highly scalable routing domain. To create the security policies within virtual networks, 802.1x Network Access Control is fully supported by all FocalPoint switches allowing policies for communications between virtual networks to be effectively enforced.

Network Convergence

Network convergence can reduce overall system cost by combining networking, storage and HPC traffic onto one network. As the central nervous system of the datacenter, the switch/router network must effectively deal with all three types of traffic at once, be able to distinguish between them and allocate its resources intelligently among them. The FM4000 switches provide eight Class of Service (CoS) queues per egress port, enabling the system administrator to finely tune the transmission characteristics of each type of traffic. Advanced scheduling, shaping and policing algorithms also allow the administrator to monitor and enforce bandwidth allocation among different classes of users.

The FocalPoint switches also offer advanced flow control and congestion management mechanisms, providing the means for creating lossless data transmission for the classes of traffic where it is required, such as storage. Finally the switches exhibit an extremely low latency of only 200 nanoseconds for layer 2 switching and 300 nanoseconds for layer 3 routing allowing high performance HPC and storage implementations.