GIG Achieved High-performance Data Center by Innovative Spine-leaf Architecture

Overview

As an edge cloud service company with 20 years of experience, GIG Technology is committed to combining the ease of use of public clouds with the data controller and location aspects brought by private clouds. In this case, GIG Technology was about to provide cloud service for a partner in Switzerland and planned to build a new data center in spine-leaf architecture, which is a common choice for modern growing small and medium-sized enterprises, cloud service providers, and large data centers.

FS helped GIG design their data center through innovative spine-and-leaf architecture to fully meet their needs for low latency, large capacity, scalability and cost-effectiveness.

Challenges

The new data center that GIG Technology planned to build for its Switzerland partner was not small—multiple rows of racks and equipment were required for customers' current and potential service needs. The traditional three-tier architecture was far from meeting their needs under the existing trend, and spine-and-leaf architecture was required to complete the deployment.

GIG is a very professional customer who gives specific details of their expectations of network infrastructure. Each rack has 8 nodes with dual 10G SFP+, an IPMI port and a management port. And there will be about 6PB of HDD storage and 1PB of SSD storage in total, most of which can be addressable from the Internet. So how do we deploy a high-performance network at a significant cost for our customers using spine-and-leaf architecture.

Solutions

Considering GIG Technology's requirements such as cost efficiency, reliability, capacity and performance, FS data center solution team have conceived and innovated the spine-and-leaf network architecture for using 40G/100G spine switches and 10G/40G leaf switches.

In this solution, FS 40G/100G spine switches functioning as a backbone provide rich interface options, high port density and high-speed forwarding communication, forming an optimized and reliable backbone transmission structure. FS selected the 10G-S5850 series as the leaf switch to handle all traffic from the access layer devices and provided uplinks to the spine. As for the 1G ToR switch, it is used to allow end-users to connect to the Internet. FS data center solution team conducted rigorous testing on the topology and equipment before delivering the solution, ensuring that all switches can provide high-density and high-performance connections to meet customers' computing and storage needs.

The FS spine-leaf data center architecture advantages:

• Simplify repeated network configuration through automation assistants such as Netconf, OpenFlow, Python, zero-configuration, and Ansible so that the entire data center can be constructed in POD (Point of Delivery) units.

• It not only provides good scalability but also prepares for next-generation networking upgrades.

• Adding or removing PODs within the capabilities of the switch will not change the network architecture, and can also be deployed in a high-quality and organized manner, which is convenient for customers to maintain later.

Customer Benefits

GIG Technology has achieved strong stability of data transmission through a set of spine-leaf architecture solutions created by our FS data center solution team. This solution supports good scalability, which is convenient for subsequent business expansion. Also, it is suitable for large data center architectures that place high demands on network switches.

In the spine-leaf architecture, FS chose the S5850 series as the leaf switch. The switch has high performance, high reliability, low latency, and a favorable price. It not only helped our customer to complete the network construction of the data center but also brought delighting experience to the end-users.