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How To Build a 100,000-Port Ethernet Switch
BobB-nw writes "University of California at San Diego researchers Tuesday are presenting a paper (PDF) describing software that they say could make data center networks massively scalable. The researchers say their PortLand software will enable Layer 2 data center network fabrics scalable to 100,000 ports and beyond; they have a prototype running at the school's Department of Computer Science and Engineering's Jacobs School of Engineering. 'With PortLand, we came up with a set of algorithms and protocols that combine the best of layer 2 and layer 3 network fabrics,' said Amin Vahdat, a computer science professor at UC San Diego. 'Today, the largest data centers contain over 100,000 servers. Ideally, we would like to have the flexibility to run any application on any server while minimizing the amount of required network configuration and state... We are working toward a network that administrators can think of as one massive 100,000-port switch seamlessly serving over one million virtual endpoints.'"
I hope they have invented something better than ordinary Ethernet cables to wire that ting with.
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
I've long been of the opinion that putting more than a few hundred hosts on a single layer 2 network is almost always a bad idea.
What do you do about broadcast storms? How do you prevent some clown from anywhere in that 100,000 machine cloud from poaching another machine's IP address (either maliciously or by an accidental typo)?
Subnets and routers were invented for a reason. Just because you can bridge the whole world together into one massive virtual Ethernet segment doesn't mean you should.
I can't just go out and buy 33,334 d-links and turn off DHCP on all but one of them?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Without getting too far into it, their brilliant plan to to insinuate a layer 2 and a half using "pseudo MAC addresses," using a directory service rather than broadcasts. They're hoping they can use this mess to paper over horrific network design.
Yeah, I'll grant you you might be able to cobble this mess together in an academic setting, and sure, you'll even be able to rig some demos that show miraculous increases in speed.
I can guarantee they'll find funding with their promise you'll even able to hire even LESS skilled network admins, meaning Zaboomafoo the Typing Lemur now has a shot at his CCIE.
But, damn, you ignorant twits. Most corporate networks are already mashed together by the most cut-rate cable monkeys they can find. The last thing we need is some half-assed "protocol" that will guarantee even more network designs that are guaranteed to trip and break their necks over the first packet.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
What a party it would be for people that likes to do broadcast storms!
Just purge the arp cache frequently and you will have a lot of broadcasts that can clog down the network.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
This seems to be a solution to a nonexistent problem. A big router, for example a cisco CRS, can be a single node supporting any data center. And it is a router, so there is no need for any exotic solution (L3 inspection on a switch?). It has a max bandwidth of 80Tb/s or 80,000 Gb Ethernet nodes. The beauty is of course that you can configure your entire data center with a single router, which greatly simplifies the network configuration, and makes changes simple.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
... they have only needed 1 port! :)