I loved the articile from The Register talking about how networks need to become flatter.
Here's why... we already believe that networks have too many tiers. Modern devices today can deliver both L2 & L3 functionality at a reasonable cost. Also, we can deliver switching platforms with high density 1gb and 10gb ports. The reason to have three or four tiers disappears.
The benefit to the customer... somewhat obvious. You bought less equipment. You have less oversubscription. Your latency drops.
But..there are benefits that most dont realize. Multi-tier architectures have greater latency...right? With federated applications there is a great amount of server to server traffic. Added latency in the network is multiplied and amplified. sort of like that famous bridge in Washington that vibrated itself to death.
If I have 5-10ms of extra latency between devices..and a single user transaction means several servers working togetether...than every transaction can have many extra ms of latency. The app starts to slow down.
But more imporant...what is a server doing while its waiting for return traffic from another server? Nothing. That means idle clock cycles on servers.. and less server utilization. Multi-tier networks will require you to have more servers than you need.
And some customer are probably masking this problem as well by buying faster cpus, more cache, SSDs, or caching systems. Costs also amplify we use other products to try to mask a bad network architecture.
Here's why... we already believe that networks have too many tiers. Modern devices today can deliver both L2 & L3 functionality at a reasonable cost. Also, we can deliver switching platforms with high density 1gb and 10gb ports. The reason to have three or four tiers disappears.
The benefit to the customer... somewhat obvious. You bought less equipment. You have less oversubscription. Your latency drops.
But..there are benefits that most dont realize. Multi-tier architectures have greater latency...right? With federated applications there is a great amount of server to server traffic. Added latency in the network is multiplied and amplified. sort of like that famous bridge in Washington that vibrated itself to death.
If I have 5-10ms of extra latency between devices..and a single user transaction means several servers working togetether...than every transaction can have many extra ms of latency. The app starts to slow down.
But more imporant...what is a server doing while its waiting for return traffic from another server? Nothing. That means idle clock cycles on servers.. and less server utilization. Multi-tier networks will require you to have more servers than you need.
And some customer are probably masking this problem as well by buying faster cpus, more cache, SSDs, or caching systems. Costs also amplify we use other products to try to mask a bad network architecture.
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