Low Latency and Congestion Avoidance – With having only a maximum of two hops between any source and destination nodes, we make a more direct traffic path, which improves performance and reduces bottleneck. Many spine-leaf networks use fixed-configuration switches. Lower Costs – Fixed-configuration switches unlike modular switches, have a fixed number of ports and are usually not expandable. If the port density is a concern, we can add a leaf switch and connect it to every spine switch. Improved Scalability – In the event of oversubscription, we can add a spine switch and connect it to every leaf switch. With STP, only one link is active and the other links are blocked. Increased Bandwidth – By implementing TRILL and SPB, we have the ability to use multiple active links instead of one and it increases bandwidth. And instead of Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), we implement Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) and Shortest Path Bridging (SPB), which allows traffic flows across all available links, offering improved redundancy, but like STP, still prevent loops. Improved Redundancy – As opposed to our traditional three-tier architecture where access layer switches connect to only two uplink distribution switches, every leaf switch connects to every spine switch. In a data center environment, it can be any kind of server, like web server, application server, database server, or storage server.īelow are the advantages and benefits of implementing spine-leaf architecture in the network: In our example above, we have servers that connect to leaf switches. It is where the leaf switches which connect to all spine switches reside. Leaf Layer – connects to end devices similar to the access layer in our three-tier design.
Each Layer 3 port is connected to the underlying Layer 2 leaf switch. It is where we can find the spine switches which can be a Layer 3 switch. Spine Layer – serves as the backbone of the network similar to the core layer in our three-tier design. East-west traffic flows are server-to-server communication within the same data center, like in our leaf-spine network topology example below. It was originally implemented in data centers to overcome the limitations of the three-tier architecture, where we have more east-west traffic than north-south traffic flow. Spine and Leaf Architecture is a two-layer, full-mesh topology composed of a leaf layer and a spine layer, with the leaf and spine switches.