Brocade Network OS Administrator’s Guide v4.1.1 - Manual (Page 30)

FIGURE 2 Ethernet fabric with multiple paths
The Ethernet fabric has the following characteristics:
• It is a switched network. The Ethernet fabric utilizes an emerging standard called Transparent
Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) as the underlying technology.
• All switches automatically know about each other and all connected physical and logical devices.
• All paths in the fabric are available. Traffic is always distributed across equal-cost paths. As
illustrated above, traffic from the source to the destination can travel across two paths.
• Traffic travels across the shortest path.
• If a single link fails, traffic is automatically rerouted to other available paths. In the topology above, if
one of the links in Active Path #1 goes down, traffic is seamlessly rerouted across Active Path #2.
• Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) is not necessary because the Ethernet fabric appears as a single
logical switch to connected servers, devices, and the rest of the network.
• Traffic can be switched from one Ethernet fabric path to the other Ethernet fabric path.
Distributed intelligence
With Brocade VCS Fabric technology, all relevant information is automatically distributed to each
member switch to provide unified fabric functionality, as illustrated below.
A Brocade VCS fabric is designed to be managed as a single "logical chassis," so that each new
switch inherits the configuration of the fabric, and the new ports become available immediately. The
fabric then appears to the rest of the network as a single switch. This significantly reduces complexity
for the management layer, which in turn improves reliability and reduces troubleshooting.
In addition, VCS fabrics provides a Netconf Application Programming Interfaces (API), as well as
extensions to OpenStack Quantum to orchestrate both physical and logical networking resources as
part of Virtual Machine deployment to support multi-tiered application topologies.
Distributed intelligence
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