Cisco Data Center Fabric

Evolution and On-Going

Innovations
 Meir Roth
 System-Engineer, Data-Center
 meiroth@cisco.com
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 1

New Data Center Demands
Impact of Virtualization and Cloud

Anything-as-a-Service VM Mobility Dynamic response

Heterogeneous Workloads
Optimize resource
for allocation across ANY LOCATION
Respond in
ANY APPLICATION real-time at
ANY SCALE

© 2010
2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 2
Traditional IT Silos

Network Compute

Application Services Storage

Inefficient Resource Utilization

Operationally Complex—Higher TCO
Promotes Human Silos

© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 3
Cisco Approach: Data Center Fabric
Unified Fabric

Network Compute

Application Services Storage

Unified Network
Unified Computing
Services

Optimized Resource Utilization

Operationally Simple—lower TCO
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Overcomes IT Silos Cisco Confidential 4
Cisco Data Center Fabric Vision
Flexible, High-Performance, Secure, Shared Infrastructure

Tightly Integrated Network, Storage, Compute and Application Services

Cisco Life cycle Services and Innovations that facilitate “enter anywhere, grow anywhere”

Open Integrated Flexible Scalable Resilient Secure

© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 5
Director-Class FCoE
Taking Unified Fabric to the
Next-Phase

© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 6
 Extending Convergence Beyond Access Layer
Industry’s First Director-Class Multi-hop FCoE
Unified Fabric

SAN Core
FC Nexus 7K
FCoE and MDS 9500:
High-Performance,

oE
Hosts Access Common Core Storage
Resilient Switches

FC
Targets
Unified Network Services

for LAN/SAN
FCoE FCoE FCoE

ures Benefits
Wire once
s 7000 FCoE:: Industry's highest performance Director-Class flexibility
SAN platform
Unified Computing

9500 FCoE support: Preserves investments in Fibre Channel

Up to SANs
45% access layer CapEx savings*
hop FCoE support: Spans Nexus 5000, Nexus 7000, and MDSROI
492% 9500.
for converged networks*
Seamlessly integrate converged networks with existing MDS FC SAN

Delivering Highly Scalable End-to-End Convergence

* Based on IDC’s UF Beyond the Access Layer White Paper
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 7
Cisco FCoE Portfolio
Director Class Solutions
Fixed Solutions

NEW

Nexus 5596
MDS 9500
Nexus 7000
NEW
NEW
Nexus 5020
Nexus 5548
F1 32-port FCoE 8-port

Nexus 5010
Nexus 2232
Nexus 4000

NX-OS & DCNM

© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 8
The Evolution of the Data-
Center Layer-2 Domain

© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 9
 Intelligent L2 Domains
POD Evolution
Inter-POD Connectivity across L3
Shipping OTV Failure Boundary Preservation
IP Cloud Failure Bounda

Core
L3

L3 Aggregation
…
L2 vPC
… … … …
Access
L2
vPC

Servers

STP+ vPC/VSS FabricPath

STP NIC Teaming 16x ECMP
Enhancements Simplified loop- Low Latency / Lossless
Bridge free trees MAC Scaling
Assurance 2x Multi-pathing Operational Flexibility

Shipping
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Shipping Shipping Cisco Confidential 10
 Delivering Industry-leading Scale
Sample Scenario: 12,000+ 10GbE Server ports*
Unified Fabric

Cisco
Nexus 7000
Scale 12,288
(10GE servers)
Architecture Open
Unified Network Services

Consolidated Shipping
Management
L2/L3 Fabric High-density 1G Shipping

Vitualization VDCs, VN-Link

1 Nexus 5596** 192 Switches required for 16

1000 ports
Unified Computing

Latency <10 usec

Any Topology.
Any Layer. Convergence Unified Ports

Any Protocol.

© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 11
 Challenges with LAN Extensions
Real Problems Solved by OTV
North
Data
Fault Center Fault
• Extensions over any transport (IP, MPLS) Domain Domain

• Failure boundary preservation

• Site independence / isolation

• Optimal BW utilization
(no head-end replication)
• Resiliency/multihoming
LAN Extension
• Built-in end-to-end loop prevention

• Multisite connectivity (inter and intra DC)

• Scalability Only 5
CLI
§VLANs, sites, MACs command
s
§ARP, broadcasts/floods
Fault Fault
• Operations simplicity Domain Domain

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hasmit-otv-00 South Data Center

© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 12
VM Aware Networking

© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 13
Cisco Fabric Extender Concept
Port Extender (Pre-standard 802.1Qbh)
Legacy multi-tier architecture FEX architecture

LAN LAN
Switch port extended over
Fabric Extender

Switch Switch

Switch FEX

Collapse networking tiers, reduce network

management points!!!
© 2010
2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 14
14
 Nexus 5000/7000 + FEX
Single Access Layer

Nexus 5000 Parent Switch

LAN SAN

+
MDS

Cisco Nexus® 2000 FEX

= N7000/
C6500

Access
N5000 Layer

N2232 N2232
Distributed Modular System
1 12

istributed Modular System

Nexus 2000 FEX is a Virtual Line Card to the Nexus 5000
Nexus 5000 maintains all management & configuration
No Spanning Tree between FEX & Nexus 5000

Over 3000 production customers!!!

Over 3 million Nexus 2000 ports deployed!!!
© 2010
2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 15
15
Extending FEX architecture to the Server
Cascading Port Extender (Pre-standard 802.1Qbh)
Legacy multi-tier architecture Adapter FEX architecture

LAN LAN
Switch port extended over
Fabric Extender

Switch Switch

Switch FEX

Adapter FEX

Bring switch ports all the way to the server

© 2010
using cascaded FEXarchitecture !!!
2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 16
16
Extending FEX architecture to Virtual Machines
Cascading Port Extender (Pre-standard 802.1Qbh)
Baseline architecture VM-FEX architecture

LAN LAN

Switch Switch Switch port extended over

cascaded Fabric Extenders
to the Virtual Machine

FEX FEX

vSwitch VM-FEX

App App App App App App

OS OS OS OS OS OS

Collapse virtual and physical networking tiers!!!

© 2010
2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 17
17
 Cisco Unified Fabric
Continued Architectural Innovation

CY11
Unified Ports Deployment Flexibility

CONVERGENCE FabricPath Architectural Flexibility / Scale

OTV Workload Mobility

FEX-link Simplified Management w/ Scale

SCALE
Nexus 1000V VM-Aware Networking

DCB/FCoE Consolidated I/O

INTELLIGENCE
vPC Active-Active Uplinks

VDC Virtualizes the Switch

CY08

© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 18
 Thank you.

© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 19