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Is ACI design bandwidth less than Campus network design?

Maivoko
Level 1
Level 1

CCNA said switch can have simultaneously bandwidth for all access ports and router can only have sharing of bandwidth 

As I know ACI is all devices are BGP routers

does more routers it passed the less bandwidth it have?

Is ACI design bandwidth less than Campus network design when it go through different fabric nodes?

If not less, how can ACI routers solve these bandwidth less problem?

 

2 Replies 2

M02@rt37
VIP
VIP

Hello @Maivoko,

In ACI, the devices are typically referred to as "leaf" switches, "spine" switches, and "APIC" controllers. While BGP is used for communication between the ACI leaf and spine switches, it's important to note that ACI's design is optimized for the data center environment and is different from traditional routing in a campus network.

The fabric is designed to provide high-speed, low-latency communication between endpoints within the data center. The fabric nodes, including spine switches and leaf switches, work together to ensure efficient data forwarding. ACI's design aims to eliminate the traditional network bottlenecks and sharing of bandwidth seen in traditional routed networks.

ACI routers, which are part of the leaf switches, use distributed routing capabilities to handle east-west traffic within the data center. These routers are designed to scale and provide efficient routing while leveraging the underlying ACI fabric's capabilities.

In this context of ACI, the bandwidth available within the fabric is designed to be high and is optimized for the data center's needs. ACI's spine-and-leaf architecture aims to provide a more balanced and efficient approach to traffic forwarding compared to traditional hierarchical campus network designs.

"switches can have simultaneously bandwidth for all access ports and routers can only have sharing of bandwidth" is a simplified way of describing how switches and routers handle traffic in a network. While it's true that switches can provide high-speed, non-blocking communication between devices in the same VLAN, routers are responsible for making routing decisions and can introduce some level of sharing of bandwidth among different networks or subnets.

 

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Joseph W. Doherty
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

"CCNA said switch can have simultaneously bandwidth for all access ports and router can only have sharing of bandwidth"

Hopefully, there's was additional context to that CCNA's pronouncement, because it's certainly not always true.

Before we even get into ACI, keep in mind "switch" and "router" are very generic, usually also implying "switch" is doing L2, while a "router" is doing L3, but for some time now, even some "L2 switches" often provide some very basic L3 routing capability (above and beyond, for years, smart/enhanced L2 switches might do things like support L3 ACLs), while router's can often bridge L2 traffic.  L3 switches, muddy the waters.

This is especially true with the old 6500 "switch" vs. the old 7600 "router" which might be populated with EXACTLY the same line cards and supervisor module(s) and, I recall (?), at one time would run EXACTLY the same IOS binary!  Of course, though, their chassis were "different".

ACI approach is much akin to how a chassis switch will operate between its supervisor module(s) and its intelligent edge/line cards.

In brief, I find it difficult to make clear, in some ways, there's nothing really new about ACI, other than it being all wrapped up in one package.

Forget ACI and/or leaf/spline architecture, and consider the classical 3 layer architecture, core(L3)/distro(L3)/access(L2).  Do we really/truly need the L3 core?  What if, we pull the core device and full mesh the distro (L3)?  What if, we replace the L3 core with a pure/dumb L2 core and have all the distro have one IP'ed interface same network, same L2 broadcast domain?  What are all the implications, good and bad?

Consider, your network is "small enough" (4032 or less edge ports) that it could be handled by VSS 6800 pair using IAs.  Is that better or worse than a traditional 3 layer network?  Which, in theory, is easier to manage?

Back to ACI, leaf/spline, it's sort of the "external" architecture of a stackable (spline) switches to which you can attach edge (leaf) switches.  In theory, one unified logical device which you can increase the capacity of by adding stackable (spline) switches and/or edge (leaf) switches.  Can you see how such an architecture might deal with bandwidth issues and/or processing issues, with (in theory) less complexity?

Again, I don't know whether the above will help in understanding ACI leaf/spline architectures, but, also again, conceptionally, you may have seen the same similar architecture on a much smaller scale than for a campus, where we all, from training and experience think of the classical 3 layer network topology.

The only other thing I'll add, keep in mind, the classical 3 layer network topology dates from only having L2 hubs and/or (very slow) L3 routers.  Hardware technology has much advanced, which allows us to scale up other network topologies/architectures.