Making clear LAN Requirements

Hey folks! How you doing?

In today's post we will make clear some facts about the LAN requirements for the data center of our bank. In the last post, where LAN requirements were discussed, some topics were not defined properly.

You can review it here.

First of all, we didn't mention why we chose the MetaFabric 1.0 - QFabric solution rather than using another one. So now, we will present other solutions, and we are going to do some summary about them, in order to justify our choice.

The solutions are the following:

• MetaFabric 1.1 - Virtualized IT Data Center With Orchestration: This solution provides the new Virtual Chassis Fabric which replaces the QFabric systems and the EX9200 core switches found in the original MetaFabric Architecture 1.0 solution, and provides a smaller scale network option for medium-sized data centers. As our will be a big enterprise, this solution does not fit in our requirements. This is why we have not chosen this solution.

• MetaFabric 2.0 - Enterprise Private Cloud Data Center: This solution creates an enterprise private cloud environment that provides a single point of control for both the physical and virtual components of the network. As MetaFabric 1.0 is designed for running business-critical applications, we thought that it was better than this one.

In the last post, we talked about the trill protocol to avoid spanning-tree protocol. As the explanation could not be clear enough, we are going to explain it a little bit more:

The trill protocol, is an IETF STANDARIZED protocol implemented by devices called RBridges (routing bridges) or TRILL Switches. TRILL combines techniques from bridging and routing and is the application of link state routing to the VLAN-aware customer-bridging problem. RBridges are compatible with and can incrementally replace previous IEEE 802.1 customer bridges. They are also compatible with IPv4 and IPv6 routers and end nodes. They are invisible to current IP routers and, like routers, RBridges terminate the bridge spanning tree protocol. RBridges run link state protocols. A link state protocol is one in which connectivity is broadcast to all the RBridges, so that each RBridge knows about all the other RBridges, and the connectivity between them. This gives RBridges enough information to compute pair-wise optimal paths for unicast, and calculate distribution trees for delivery of frames either to destinations whose location is unknown or to multicast or broadcast groups. The link state routing protocol used is IS-IS.

Hope you have understood a little bit more our deployment.