Note: This paper synthesizes documented outcomes from publicly available case studies from Arista (e.g., Microsoft, LinkedIn), Cisco (e.g., eBay, PayPal), Juniper (e.g., DreamHost, Riot Games), and open-source SONiC deployments.
A dual-leaf IP Fabric with intelligent load balancing. Using VXLAN with native ECMP (as opposed to static LAGs), the fabric performed per-packet or per-flow load balancing depending on configuration (e.g., flowlet switching).
For any organization building or renovating a data center network today, the question is not “Should we deploy an IP Fabric?” but rather “How quickly can we decommission our legacy core to deploy one?” End of paper.
A white-box IP Fabric running SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud). 64x 100GbE spines, 256x 40/100GbE leaves. VXLAN with EVPN Type 5 routes (IP prefixes, not just MACs).
A leaf-spine IP Fabric using VXLAN-BGP EVPN. 4x Spine switches (100GbE), 48x Leaf switches (25GbE to servers, 100GbE to spines). Orchestration via Ansible and a Network Source of Truth (NetBox).
An IP Fabric with EVPN Multi-Homing (ESI – Ethernet Segment Identifier). The fabric stretched the legacy VLANs across a DCI using EVPN Type 2 routes over a WAN.
