Sunday, January 17, 2021

Downsides of 400Gb breakout

Faced with a multi switch solution where the bandwidth in a single 32port-400Gb(maybe 64 if they are available in time) switch is enough, are there any downsides in such set up? Our uplink is 25Gb, so I'm not sure how will that work out.

Edit 1:

I wanted to frame the question in the general context, but I think I should give more details. The goal is to get 100Gb connectivity to the servers, as that (I think) will be a significant improvement from our current setup, which is 25Gb, this cluster of computers will run compute heavy software, think Apache Spark and the likes, so east-west traffic is much more important than north-south. A vendor recommended a leaf-spine(interestingly two spines, maybe LAG?), but after I saw the cost and complexity, and not to mention the waste of down ports given the power limitations within a single rack, It didn't seem like the most optimal idea. So I asked about 400Gb and breakouts, but they advised against it. Also I might be missing some obvious things, as I don't have a good networking background.



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