Dell Enterprise SONiC supports two primary deployment models—Layer 3 and Layer 2—as a foundation on which different use cases are deployed.

Data centers (DCs) serve as a connection hub for numerous servers, facilitating communication between internal and external users. Generally, every DC runs two kinds of traffic, the first being client/server or north-south traffic. The source of north-south traffic is typically from external networks, both from within the organization and from the Internet. This traffic is usually between web server applications and browsers for both internal and external users.

The other type of traffic is between servers within the data center and is called server-to-server or east-west traffic. The source of server-to-server traffic might be virtual machine migrations, extensive data replication, and storage traffic. This traffic often amounts to about 80% of all DC traffic.