Data Center Networking

Once the majority of your traffic moves server-to-server rather than client-to-server, which is the normal situation in any virtualized or containerized environment, a spine-leaf fabric delivers more bandwidth and more predictable latency for the same hardware spend. The deciding factor is traffic profile: if east-west flows dominate, three-tier designs turn into a bottleneck you cannot tune away.

General-purpose enterprise workloads are generally comfortable at 3:1 at the leaf, while GPU training pods and NVMe-over-Fabrics workloads normally justify 1:1 to avoid collective stalls during all-reduce operations. We model both against your actual flow data, so you can see the cost difference before choosing rather than discovering it after deployment.

RoCEv2 requires a lossless transport to preserve throughput, which means priority flow control and ECN must be configured deliberately rather than left at defaults. A fabric that is not tuned will usually pass traffic but suffer sharp throughput drops during microbursts. Whether you need full lossless depends on workload sensitivity, so we size it to the actual application.

Most modern spine platforms accept higher-speed line cards or share the same hardware SKU across port speeds, so uplinks can move first while access ports stay at 25G or 100G. Designing for that upgrade path from the start is far cheaper than replacing the fabric, and we plan for it explicitly during selection.

Yes. Many organizations run a dedicated lossless rail for GPU nodes alongside their production fabric, sharing management, telemetry and spares. We design both, size the buffers independently and ensure the two domains interconnect cleanly at the border, rather than forcing GPU traffic onto a fabric that was never tuned for it.

A typical handover includes Ansible playbooks for VLAN fabric provisioning, port configuration templates and telemetry dashboards, plus a written runbook covering upgrades and common failure scenarios. If you prefer vendor controllers, we can implement Cisco NDFC or Huawei iMaster NCE-Fabric instead of custom tooling.

Within a rack or a short row, DAC and AOC cost significantly less than optical transceivers and consume less power. Beyond roughly 100 metres, DR4 over parallel single-mode is usually the most economical step, with FR4 preferred when you want duplex fiber reuse. We match optics to measured distances so you are not paying for reach you will never use.