Thinking about Data Center Solutions

Engineers from La Salle-URL share the latest news and projects in the field of network solutions in telematic engineering.

18 March 2015 | Posted by Redacción Data Center

Case Study: Storage and Network

In the last post of the network solution I explained the benefits of my proposed solution that is implemented by arista. In this post i will explain the differences beetween cisco's solution and my solution. Also i will introduce the part of storage that is also implemented by arista.

So as we saw in the last post, arista offers a network that accomplish all the requirements of the case study. But how this solution differs from cisco?

The main difference resides in the protocols used to resolve the network. Cisco uses main protocols that only work with their devices but the final result is very similar or even worse depending in what we are looking for. But when we speak about speed of the network it can be said that both solutions will have speeds up to 10G, 40G and 100G.

aristanet

In the other hand, in order to implement the  storaging network, i will use also the implementation by Arista.

To meet the challenges of transporting storage on an IP/Ethernet network, the Arista solution includes these features and technology to assist with the IP storage challenges:

  • Massively scalable Leaf/Spine non-blocking topology: Leaf/Spine topology effectively solves the IP/Ethernet storage challenge of massive east to west traffic.  The solution ensures effective use of all available bandwidth in a white paper deploying ip storage infrastructures 6non-blocking mode and provides failover and resiliency when any individual chassis or port has an outage condition, that is possible with the protocols MLAG and ECMP.
  • Deep buffering technology and lossless delivery: Supports mechanisms that help to ensure the lossless delivery for IP/Ethernet storage by utilizing the IEEE standardized set of features called Data Center
    Bridging (DCB). DCB works to make Ethernet a lossless medium and thus is well suited for storage networks that run directly over Ethernet such as FCoE or AoE.
  • Operational visibility into the network to provide an early warning of congestion: Traditional tools that are used to monitor network traffic patterns, such as Remote Monitoring (RMON) and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), are based on a polling model where data typically is collected at one second or longer intervals.

Arista switches deliver a deep buffers to address TCP incast, operational flexibility and extensibility, and a highly resilient, available and cost effective network to meet the demands of data growth and next-generation storage networks.

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