Providing Redundancy From Access to Aggregation
The aggregation layer, with many access layer uplinks connected to it, has the primary responsibility of aggregating the thousands of sessions leaving and entering the data center. The aggregation switches must support many 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) and Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) interconnects while providing a high-speed switching fabric with a high-forwarding rate. The aggregation layer also provides value-added services, such as server load balancing, firewalling and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) offloading to the servers across the access layer switches.
The aggregation layer switches carry the workload of spanning-tree processing and default gateway redundancy protocol processing. The aggregation layer might be the most critical layer in the data center, because port density, oversubscription values, CPU processing and service modules introduce unique implications into the overall design.
When designing an aggregation layer, consider the following features:
- Port density of 10GbE, flexibility for 40/100GbE down the road — Line-rate density can future-proof your investment as your needs grow.
- Power consumption — Drive power consumption improvements at the data center.
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