hyperscale networking

Hyperscale Networking

 

 

Hyperscale Networking

In today’s digital age, where data is generated at an unprecedented rate, traditional networking infrastructures are struggling to keep up with the demand. Enter hyperscale networking, a revolutionary paradigm transforming how we build and manage networks. In this blog post, we will explore the concept of hyperscale networking, its benefits, and its impact on various industries.

Hyperscale networking refers to quickly and seamlessly scaling network infrastructure to accommodate massive amounts of data, traffic, and users. It is a distributed architecture that leverages cloud-based technologies and software-defined networking (SDN) principles to achieve unprecedented scalability, agility, and efficiency.

Throughout the last 5-years, data center innovation has come from companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft. These companies are referred to as hyper-scale players. The vision of Big Switch is to take hyperscale concepts developed by these companies and bring them to smaller data centers around the world in the version of hyperscale networking, enabling a hyperscale architecture.

 

Before you proceed, you may find the following helpful post for pre-information:

  1. Virtual Data Center Design
  2. ACI Networks
  3. Application Delivery Architecture
  4. ACI Cisco
  5. Data Center Design Guide

 



Hyperscale Networking

Key Hyperscale Architecture Discussion Points:


  • Introduction to hyperscale architecture and what is involved.

  • Highlighting the challenges of a standard chassis design.

  • Critical points on bare metal switches.

  • Technical details on the core and pod designs.

  • SDN controller architecture and distributed routing.

 

  • A key point: Video on Hyperscale computing

In the following video, we will address Hyperscale computing. In computing, hyperscale is the ability of an architecture to scale appropriately as increased demand is added to the system. Hyperscale is the ability to scale, for example, compute, memory, networking, and storage resources appropriately to demand to facilitate distributed computing environments.

They employ a disaggregated architectural approach, scaling to over 50,000 servers, often seen in cloud computing and big data environments. Hyperscale architecture is the secret sauce for Facebook and Google. It allowed them to respond efficiently to massively complex workloads while lowering costs.

 

Technology Brief : Cloud Computing - Introducing Hypercomputing
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Back to basic with OpenFlow

With OpenFlow, the switching device has no control plane, as the controller interacts directly with the FIB. Instead, OpenFlow provides a packet format and protocol to carry these packets that now describes forwarding table entries in the FIB. In OpenFlow documentation, the FIB is referred to as the flow table, as it contains information about each flow the switch needs to know about.

Critical Benefits of Hyperscale Networking:

1. Scalability: Hyperscale networking allows organizations to scale their networks effortlessly as demand grows. With traditional networking, scaling often involves costly hardware upgrades and complex configurations. In contrast, hyperscale networks can scale horizontally by adding more commodity hardware, resulting in significantly lower costs and simplified network management.

2. Agility: In the fast-paced digital landscape, businesses must adapt quickly to changing requirements. Hyperscale networking enables organizations to deploy and provision network resources on demand, reducing time-to-market for new services and applications. This agility empowers businesses to respond rapidly to customer demands and gain a competitive edge.

3. Enhanced Performance: Hyperscale networks are designed to handle massive data and traffic efficiently. By distributing workloads across multiple nodes, these networks can deliver superior performance, low latency, and high throughput. This translates into a seamless user experience and improved productivity for businesses.

4. Cost Efficiency: Traditional networking often involves significant upfront investments in proprietary hardware and complex infrastructure—hyperscale networking leverages off-the-shelf hardware and cloud-based technologies, resulting in cost savings and reduced operational expenses. Moreover, the ability to scale horizontally eliminates the need for expensive equipment upgrades.

Hyperscale Networking in Various Industries:

1. Cloud Computing: Hyperscale networking is the backbone of cloud computing platforms. It enables cloud service providers to deliver scalable and reliable services to millions of users worldwide. By leveraging hyperscale architectures, these providers can efficiently manage massive workloads and deliver high-performance cloud services.

2. Internet of Things (IoT): The proliferation of IoT devices generates enormous amounts of data that must be processed and analyzed in real time. Hyperscale networking provides the infrastructure to handle the massive data influx from IoT devices, ensuring seamless connectivity, efficient data processing, and rapid insights.

3. E-commerce: The e-commerce industry heavily relies on hyperscale networking to handle the ever-increasing number of online transactions, user interactions, and inventory management. With hyperscale networks, e-commerce platforms can ensure fast and secure transactions, reliable inventory management, and personalized user experiences.

 

Hyperscale Architecture

Hyperscale networking consists of three things. The first element is bare metal and open switch hardware. Bare metal switches are sold without software, making up 10% of all ports shipped. The second hyperscale aspect is Software Defined Networking (SDN). In SDN vision, you have one device acting as a controller, which manages the physical and virtual infrastructure.

The third element is the actual data architecture—Big Switch leverages what’s known as the Core-and-Pod design. Core-and-Pod differs from the traditional core, aggregation, and edge model, allowing incredible scale and automation when deploying applications.

 

hyperscale networking
Diagram: Hyperscale Networking

 

Standard Chassis Design vs. SDN Design

Standard chassis-based switches have supervisors, line cards, and fabric backplanes. In addition, a proprietary protocol runs between the blades for controls. Big Switch has all of these components but is named differently. Under the covers, the supervisor module acts like an SDN controller, programming the line cards and fabric backplane.

Instead of supervisors, they have a controller, and the internal chassis proprietary protocol is OpenFlow. The leaf switches are treated like line cards, and the spine switches are like the fabric backplane. In addition, they offer an OpenFlow-integrated architecture.

Hyperscale architecture
Diagram: Hyperscale architecture

 

Traditional data center topologies operate on hierarchical tree architecture. The big switch follows a new networking architecture called spine leaf architecture, which overcomes the shortcomings of conventional tree architectures. To map the leaf and spine to traditional data center terminology, the leaf is accessed, and the spine is a core switch.

In addition, the leaf and spine operate on the concept that every leaf has equidistant endpoints. Designs with equidistant endpoints make POD placement and service insertion easier than hierarchical tree architecture.

Big Switch hyperscale architecture has multiple connection points. Similar to Equal Cost Multipath (ECMP) fabric and Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation (MLAG), enabling layer 2 and layer 3 multipathing. This type of connectivity allows you to have network partition problems without having a global effect. You still lose your spin switch’s capacity but have not lost connectivity. The controller controls all this and has a central view.

 

  • Losing a leaf switch in a leaf and spine architecture is not a big deal as long as you have configured multiple paths.

Bare metal switches

The first hyperscale design principle is to utilize bare metal switches. Bare metal switches are Ethernet switches sold without software. Disaggregating the hardware from the switches software allows you to build your switch software stack. Cheaper in terms of CAPEX and allows you to better tune the operating system to what you need. It gives you the ability to tailor the operations to specific requirements.

 

Core and pod design

Traditional core-agg-edge is a monolithic design that cannot evolve. Hyperscale companies are now designing to a core-and-pod design, allowing operations to improve faster. Data centers are usually made up of two core components. One is the core with the Layer 3 routes for ingress and egress routing. Then, you have a POD, a self-contained unit connected to the core.

Intra-communication between PODs is done via core. A POD is a certified design of servers, storage, and network. They are all grouped into standard services. Each POD contains an atomic networking, computing, and storage unit attached directly to the core via Layer 2 or Layer 3. Due to a PODs-fixed configuration, automation is simple and stable.

 

Hyperscale Networking and Big Switch Products

Big Tap and Big Cloud Fabric are two-product streams from Big Switch. Both use a fabric architecture built on white box switches with a centralized controller and POD design. Big clouds hyperscale architecture is designed to be a network for a POD.

Each Big Cloud architecture instance is a pair of redundant SDN controllers, and a leaf/spine topology is the network for your POD. Switches have zero-touch, so they are stateless, turn them on, and it boots and downloads the switch image and configuration. It auto-discovers all of the links and troubleshoots any physical problems.

 

OpenFlow

 

 

SDN controller architecture

There are generic architectural challenges of SDN controller-based networks. The first crucial question is, where are the controller and network devices split? In OpenFlow, it’s clear that the split is between the control plane and the data plane. The split affects the outcomes from various events, such as a controller bug, controller failure, network partitions, and the size of the failure domain.

You might have an SDN controller cluster, but every single controller is; still a single point of failure. The controller cluster protects you from hardware failures but not from software failures. If someone misconfigures or corrupts the controller database, you lose the controller regardless of how many controllers are in a cluster.

Every controller is a single fat fingers domain. Due to the complexity of clusters and clustering protocols, you could implement failures by the lousy design. Every distributed system is complex, and it is even more challenging if it has to work with real-time data.

 

SDN Controllers

 

 

SDN controller – Availability Zones

The optimum design is to build controllers per availability zones. If one controller fails, you lose that side of the fabric but still have another fabric. You must-have applications that can run in multiple availability zones to use this concept. Availability zones are great, but applications must be adequately designed to use them. Availability zones usually relate to a single failure domain.

How do you deal with failures, and what failure rate is acceptable? The failure rate acceptance level drives the redundancy in your network. Full redundancy is a great design goal as it reduces the probability of total network failure. But full redundancy will never give you 100% availability. Network partitions still happen with fully redundant networks.

Be careful of split-brain scenarios when you have one controller looking after one partition and another looking after the other partitions. The way Big Switch overcomes time is with a distributed control plane. The forwarding elements are aligned so a network partition can happen.

 

Hyperscale Architecture: Big Switch distributed routing.

For routing, they have the concept known as a tenant router. With the tenant router, you can say that these two-broadcast domains can talk to each other via policy points. A tenant router is a logical router physically distributed throughout the entire network. Every switch has a copy of the tenant routers routing table local to it. The routing state is spread everywhere. No specific layer 3 points that traffic needs to cross to get from one layer 2 segment to the other.

As all the leaf switches have a distributed copy of the database, all routing takes the most optimal path. When two-broadcast domains are on the same leaf switch, traffic does not have to hairpin to a physical layer 3 points.

You can map the application directly to the tenant router, which acts like a VRF with VRF packet forwarding hardware. This is known as micro-segmentation. With this, you can put a set of applications or VM in a tenant, demarc the network by the tenant, and have per tenant policy.

Conclusion:

Hyperscale networking is revolutionizing how we build and manage networks in the digital era. Its ability to scale effortlessly, provide agility, enhance performance, and reduce costs makes it a game-changer in various industries. As data volumes grow, organizations must embrace hyperscale networking to stay competitive, deliver exceptional user experiences, and drive innovation in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.