Deploying any sort of network fabric is daunting. It requires a specialized skill set from different areas such as compute, storage, and networking to create an optimum environment.
Oftentimes this type of deployments takes weeks to months of planning and designing. This is done to accommodate all the different requirements brought upon by the type of workloads, storage type, and networking capacity and features to be enabled.
Dell Technologies and BeyondEdge bring fabric orchestration for the GenAI environment through tight integration, and intelligent automation that creates a live fabric graphical representation that is zoomable and navigable.
With BeyondEdge Verity, the entire fabric is seen as well as specific portions of the fabric. This capability provides greater insight into the fabric for troubleshooting, management, and improvement.
In addition, accurate device inventory with detailed real time and historical actionable analytics are provided.
The entire provisioning of the fabric consists of three steps:
- Dell’s Fabric Design Center (FDC) online tool (or an existing configuration) creates the device configuration file
- FDC into BeyondEdge Verity import the file
- Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) and auto-discovery deploy the configuration files
A leaf and spine fabric consisting of seven leaf and three spine switches take approximately 30 minutes to be fully configured with the Dell Enterprise SONiC networking operating system and related Layer 3 features, such as BGP EVPN VXLAN.
This is significantly less time than the traditional deployment model using command-line interface (CLI). Mistakes are common with this model and can take up to several days if not weeks to configure all the switches in the fabric.
The optimization of these deployments results in reduction of repetitive tasks, efficient use of IT resources, shorter amount of time to service delivery, and better overall fabric management.