[179883] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: Thousands of hosts on a gigabit LAN, maybe not
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jerry J. Anderson, CCIE #5000)
Sun May 10 01:27:08 2015
X-Original-To: nanog@nanog.org
From: "Jerry J. Anderson, CCIE #5000" <jerry.anderson@wiline.com>
To: <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To:
Date: Sat, 9 May 2015 15:14:17 -0600
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
> Some people I know (yes really) are building a system that will have
> several thousand little computers in some racks. Each of the
> computers runs Linux and has a gigabit ethernet interface. It occurs
> to me that it is unlikely that I can buy an ethernet switch with
> thousands of ports, and even if I could, would I want a Linux system
> to have 10,000 entries or more in its ARP table.
>
> Most of the traffic will be from one node to another, with
> considerably less to the outside. Physical distance shouldn't be a
> problem since everything's in the same room, maybe the same rack.
>
> What's the rule of thumb for number of hosts per switch, cascaded
> switches vs. routers, and whatever else one needs to design a dense
> network like this? TIA
Brocade's Virtual Cluster Switching (VCS) fabric on their VDX switches =
is a good solution for large, flat data center networks like
this. It's based on TRILL, so no STP or tree structure are required. =
All ports are live, as is all inter-switch bandwidth. Cisco
has a similar solution, as do other vendors.
Thank you,
Jerry
--=20
Jerry J. Anderson, CCIE #5000
Member, Anderson Consulting, LLC
800 Ridgeview Ave, Broomfield, CO=A0 80020-6618
Office: 650-523-2132=A0=A0=A0=A0 Mobile: 773-793-7717
www.linkedin.com/in/AndersonConsultingLLC
