The strength of titans building networks that support vertical

growth

Who am I ?

• Enterprise Network

Architect at ESTA 000

• Cisco certified

• Juniper Ambassador and

certified

• Tech Field Day delegate

• blog.ciscoinferno.net @pandom_

• Issues with traditional

networks

• Clos fabrics and spine /

leaf architectures

• Overlay networking

• Issues solved and

takeaways

Topics

–Winston Churchill

“Never has so much been owed by so many to

so few.”

Current challenges

Y U NO

WORK

RIGHT?!?!

Foundations

• Old application tiers

+ FW/LB

• ACLs, Routes,

Subnets, VLANs

• Current campus &

DC

architecture does

not

scale

Services

• Poor time to market

• North South focused topology for

East West applications

• Logical/Physical/Virtual cluster….

Scale

• How many hops?

• Traditional physical problems

• It isn’t all about size

Drivers • Weak business

case

• Poor market

evaluations

• Wrong target

customers

Business culture

• Box huggers

• Old vs New

• Marke-tecture

• Emotional buy in

Can we solve these

problems?

What we

have to

contend

with

Average of 13 hops

How does my network

help me get here?

Clos Fabric

• 1953 - Telecommunications heritage

• Three tier - Ingress, Middle, Egress

• Allows us to build Spine and Leaf topologies.

Spine and Leaf

• 12,000 ports is a good start

• Oversubscription

• Easily expanded

• Trident II

Multistage Clos

• Fixed switches with Trident 2 chipsets - 500ns

• Chassis - 5us between line cards

• 3 stage CLOS is 1.5us

Leveraging a CLOS

fabric

There are products

solving these problems

today

April 2nd

August 26th

September 16th October 29th

November 7th

Thank me

later

Foundations • End to End application smarts

• CLOS/Spine and leaf

• Reduce hair pinning

• In-hypervisor services

Services

• Reduced time to market

• East West application

accommodated

• Virtual everything with

physical egress

Scale

• It is like a fine wine

• Small containers &

Deterministic failure domains

• Size comes with strong base

building blocks

Drivers

• Clear business goals

• Strong understanding of

customers

• Identify opportunity and

deliver value add

• Sweat equity = amazing

• Hulk ‘silo’ Smash

• Lift the veil - dissolve

the marketing

• Involvement and

understanding

Business culture

Takeaways

• CLOS - Leaf spines are a sound and stable underlay

for tunnel fabrics

• Foundation - Services - Scale - Drivers - Culture

ALL play their part.

• NFV and SDN isn’t scary and technology such as

NSX allows you to work more closely with your

networking department and NOT around them.

Questions?

Thank you