3.1. Traditional DC Topology
3.1. Traditional DC Topology
In the networking industry, a common design choice for data centers typically looks like an (upside down) tree with redundant uplinks and three layers of hierarchy namely; core, aggregation/distribution, and access layers (see Figure 1). To accommodate bandwidth demands, each higher layer, from the server towards DC egress or WAN, has higher port density and bandwidth capacity where the core functions as the "trunk" of the tree-based design. To keep terminology uniform and for comparison with other designs, in this document these layers will be referred to as Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 "tiers", instead of core, aggregation, or access layers.
+------+ +------+
| | | |
| |--| | Tier 1
| | | |
+------+ +------+
| | | |
+---------+ | | +----------+
| +-------+--+------+--+-------+ |
| | | | | | | |
+----+ +----+ +----+ +----+
| | | | | | | |
| |-----| | | |-----| | Tier 2
| | | | | | | |
+----+ +----+ +----+ +----+
| | | |
| | | |
| +-----+ | | +-----+ |
+-| |-+ +-| |-+ Tier 3
+-----+ +-----+
| | | | | |
<- Servers -> <- Servers ->
Figure 1: Typical DC Network Topology
Unfortunately, as noted previously, it is not possible to scale a tree-based design to a large enough degree for handling large-scale designs due to the inability to be able to acquire Tier 1 devices with a large enough port density to sufficiently scale Tier 2. Also, continuous upgrades or replacement of the upper-tier devices are required as deployment size or bandwidth requirements increase, which is operationally complex. For this reason, REQ1 is in place, eliminating this type of design from consideration.