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Data Center Network Topologies

Medium

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Why data center networks had to change

Traditional three-tier data center networks were designed for north-south traffic: clients connecting to servers through a hierarchical tree. Modern workloads are 80% east-west: microservices calling microservices, VMs talking to storage, containers communicating across hosts.

The three-tier hierarchy bottlenecks at the core for east-west traffic. Spine-leaf and fat-tree designs flatten the hierarchy for uniform bandwidth at any scale.

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