Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Networking > Dell PowerScale: Leaf-Spine Network Best Practices > Introduction
Next-generation, multi-rack, data center solutions require performance, scale, and capacity to drive new and demanding workloads. A leaf-spine back-end network architecture supports these needs and facilitates larger deployments. The solution in this document describes a leaf-spine back-end network architecture with Dell Ethernet switches and a PowerScale cluster that can scale up to 252 nodes.
Dell PowerScale scale-out NAS nodes used InfiniBand switches exclusively as the private network for the back-end, intracluster, node-to-node communication before the OneFS 8.1 operating system, which introduced the use of Ethernet switches. OneFS 8.1.1 introduced a choice of Dell Ethernet switches for the back end to simplify configurations and provide a full Dell solution, and OneFS 8.2 enabled the deployment of a leaf-spine back-end network topology.