Today on the Datanauts podcast, we review the state of Ethernet fabrics in 2018.

Between 2010 and 2012, before SDN became the new marketing hotness, it seemed like vendors were churning out Ethernet fabric products for the data center. Everyone had at least one fabric, and some had two or three.

As time has marched on, many of those Ethernet fabrics have dropped off the map. To catch us up and review what Ethernet fabric means today is Stefan Fouant. Stefan is the Chief Architect at Copper River Technologies, a Juniper Ambassador, a quadruple JNCIE, and author of the book Day One: Junos Fusion Data Center Up and Running.

We look at the status of Ethernet fabric protocols such as TRILL and SPB. We also dig into BGP EVPN, the latest hot fabric.

We also discuss the characteristics of a fabric, look at reasons why a fabric might make sense in your data center, and explore inter-fabric connectivity.

Show Links:

Day One: Junos Fusion Data Center Up and Running – Stefan Fouant

Shortest Path First – Stefan Fouant’s blog

Stefan Fouant on Twitter

Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) – IETF

Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) – Wikipedia

BGP MPLS-Based Ethernet VPN – IETF

Datanauts 011: Understanding Leaf-Spine Networks – Packet Pushers

Show 366: Inside Cisco EVPN (Sponsored) – Packet Pushers