Big Cloud Fabric: Software-defined networking with Dell Technologies’ Open Networking switches

Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) from Arista Networks brings hyperscale data center design principles to enterprise data centers. The industry’s first software-defined networking (SDN) data center fabric, BCF is powered by a Clos-based fabric architecture that provides physical network automation, visibility, and troubleshooting for VMware environments.

BCF provides high east-west bisectional bandwidth, secure multitenancy (enterprise virtual private clouds), and workload elasticity. Customers benefit from application agility due to automation, massive operational simplification due to SDN, and dramatic cost reduction due to hardware and software disaggregation that is enabled by Open Networking switches from Dell Technologies.

The following figure shows the network topology that supports various workload types:

Figure 13.          Big Cloud Fabric: Support for compute workloads

BCF supports both physical and virtual (multihypervisor) workloads and a choice of orchestration software. It provides Layer 2 switching, Layer 3 routing, and Layer 4 through Layer 7 service insertion and chaining while ensuring high bisectional bandwidth. The scalable fabric is fully resilient with no single point of failure and supports headless mode operations.

Combined with Dell Technologies’ high-performing Open Networking switches, BCF delivers an SDN solution that enables data centers to drive innovation in VMware SDDC environments. BCF provides network automation for multiple VMware products that include vSphere, NSX, vSAN, and Integrated OpenStack. It also delivers new visibility and troubleshooting capabilities for both VMware and network administrators with the aid of the BCF plug-in for vSphere Web Client and VMware vRealize Log Insight.