Friday, December 5, 2014

Monitoring leaf and spine fabric performance


A leaf and spine fabric is challenging to monitor. The fabric spreads traffic across all the switches and links in order to maximize bandwidth. Unlike traditional hierarchical network designs, where a small number of links can be monitored to provide visibility, a leaf and spine network has no special links or switches where running CLI commands or attaching a probe would provide visibility. Even if it were possible to attach probes, the effective bandwidth of a leaf and spine network can be as high as a Petabit/second, well beyond the capabilities of current generation monitoring tools.

The 2 minute video provides an overview of some of the performance challenges with leaf and spine fabrics and demonstrates Fabric View - a monitoring solution that leverages industry standard sFlow instrumentation in commodity data center switches to provide real-time visibility into fabric performance. Fabric View is an application running on InMon's Switch Fabric Accelerator SDN controller. Other applications can automatically respond to problems and apply controls to protect against DDoS attacks, reduce latency and increase throughput.

Visit sFlow.com to learn more, evaluate pre-release versions of these products, or discuss requirements.

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