"The customer can effectively flatten their network by combining access and aggregation into this one cluster switch layer," Nolet explains. Fabric flattens the hierarchy of three layers--core, aggregation and access--that is the architecture of client-server networks of old.
Lastly, Cisco aims to maintain its networking lead in the fabric era with its Cisco Unified Fabric "vision," says Shashi Kiran, senior director of Cisco Data Center Solutions. The Unified Fabric strategy combines Cisco Nexus switches and MDS SAN switches with its NX-OS operating system and FabricPath, its variation on the TRILL standard also supported by Brocade. FabricPath has been deployed by more than 1,000 customers worldwide, the company says. The key to Cisco’s Unified Fabric vision is "architectural flexibility," explains Kiran.
"The underlying infrastructure customers invest in has to be adaptable enough to accommodate heterogeneous workloads and diverse business requirements," he says, whether in traditional enterprises, Web 2.0 environments, big data operations, or the cloud or service provider markets.
The shortest path bridging (SBN) protocol is actually the more mature of the prevailing fabric standards, says ZK Research’s Keravalla, and is the technology behind fabric technology from vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya and Huawei.
It’s because fabric is just emerging widely that companies are vying against each other for buyer attention, says the 451 Group’s Hanselman. "They are still fundamentally proprietary," he says. "The reason why they are all [going after] each other is because they want their customers to commit to their proprietary fabric."
To separate the hype and marketing buzz from available, reliable and affordable fabric solutions, Keravalla suggests taking a cue from compute vendors on how to choose. The traditional way of looking at network infrastructure has been to look at things like backplane capacity and overall port density. Now, in some ways, that doesn’t matter because the available options are all pretty fast; perhaps server-to-server latency would be a better yardstick.
However Keravalla wonders how best to measure the comparative merits of fabric offerings: "I just think we’re a little too early in it right now to have any kind of good best practice."
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