In today's data centers, virtualization deployments have become commonplace, and this trend is growing rapidly with the availability of 10 Gigabit Ethernet servers at attractive prices. Increased adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet servers coupled with applications using higher bandwidth is accelerating the need for dense 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet switching. Moreover, data center architectures are evolving to accommodate customers seeking to build large-scale nonblocking fabrics to support different applications, creating heavy east-west or north-south traffic. Leaf-and-spine layer designs using high-density and low-latency switches lead to flatter network architectures, allowing connections that scale from hundreds to more than 10,000 servers with large bisectional bandwidth and helping ensure low-latency fabric with a low hop count.
