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Modern datacenters face multiple design challenges, and one of the biggest is in physical network design. Their logical layout and physical topology allow network architects to connect applications, services, and microservices. Virtualization and increasing adoption of cloud computing technologies, along with the explosive proliferation of data, has further compounded the challenges these architects face.
Virtualization in particular presents one of the most important challenges. With network virtualization, architects can divide their networks into meaningful segments that group similar services and applications together. Such designs can increase efficiency by limiting network congestion and helping to secure traffic. Each application or microservice likely resides on or is connected to virtual machines or containers, which also use virtual networking technologies. At each layer of application and datacenter design, the logical separation of networking services using virtualization is critical.
Advanced Network Partitioning (NPAR) is a switch-dependent NIC partitioning technology from Dell and Broadcom that can help organizations address some of these logical and physical networking management issues by giving them greater control over ports, partitions, and VLANs. With prior versions of NPAR, administrators could partition a NIC, but any VLAN assignment would be the same on all partitions of that network port. With Advanced NPAR, administrators using Fabric Manager can now assign VLANs to each partition, and the switch is made aware of those VLAN assignments.