Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation

Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA) represents new solutions of the company, becomes a disruptive network architecture for data processing centers and the herald of an era of the infrastructures focused on applications (Application-Centric Infrastructure). The new architecture is developed for transformation of data processing centers and better fulfillment of requirements of the existing and new applications in a cloud environment, the Cisco company reported on July 2, 2013.

The main thing in Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation

• The optimized infrastructure increasing efficiency and scalability. The optimized spine-leaf topology with expanded data transmission, the distributed level of management (control plane) and integration of physical and virtual levels allows to move freely physical and virtual machines in any place of any network, raising possibilities of expansion of networks. Besides, it increases reliability of networks due to minimization of failures and increases scalability of the multirent environment, supporting more than 10 thousand networks or tenants.

• The simplified factory management using the open interfaces API for simplification of problems of operation. Cisco Prime DCNM 7.0 provides centralized operation by factory and supports the automated selection of network resources, uniform access point to factory and also complete transparency a host systems, networks and tenants. The open interfaces API create closer integration with means of coordination and automation of resources and also with cloud platforms.

• Solution Cisco Prime Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) 7.0. The uniform point of management allowing to automate and simplify deployment of infrastructure supports selection of resources in the dynamic mode for virtual machines and provides means for search and fault recovery.

Solution Cisco Prime Network Services Controller 3.6. This solution in the dynamic mode creates network services, performs communication with the systems of VMware and Cisco Nexus 1000V and transfers necessary information to the solution DCNM.

The automated selection of resources for increase in flexibility provides automation of selection of resources, simplifying connection of physical servers and virtual machines and their movement in factory. Automatically creates network politicians on the basis of network profiles and sets these politicians in network at the moment when the system administrator selects resources for virtual and physical machines. When moving the virtual machine the network policy is automatically applied on the switch connected with this machine.

Filling and expansion

Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation automates selection of network resources, simplifies factory management (Fabric Management) and optimizes it for increase in efficiency and scalability. The Nexus 7000 family is expanded. In it there were new Nexus 7700 switches and new modules of input-output F3 maintaining the scalability, best in the industry, 40G/100G and the most full range of functions of switching for DPC.

The main properties of new architecture Cisco for DPC

• high speed of installation of applications (any workload at any time). Completely automated programmable network infrastructure reduces an implementation time of applications.

• The general open platform for physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure. The new architecture will provide a full integration between physical and virtual applications and normalizes access to them from terminal units. At the same time it will support flexibility of the software, high performance, scalability and transparency of hardware devices during the work in any environment: multivendor, virtualized, especially the equipment room distributed, scaled and cloud.

• The system nature of architecture – means the complete simplified approach, integration of infrastructure, services and functions of information security, receiving telemetered informations in real time and a possibility of expansion for support of future services.

• Uniform policy, management and operation. Uniform structure for management of politicians and a uniform operational model will support automation for the benefit of all employees who are responsible for network, information security and applications. In the future this structure will extend to computing resources and storage systems.

• The open interfaces API, the software with the open code and work in the multivendor environment. Support of an extensive ecosystem of the partners using a broad spectrum of the published open interfaces API.

• Use of the best custom and public processor solutions. The balanced approach accelerates innovations and distribution of new solutions at customers and supports transition to the infrastructure focused on applications and ready to the future. This approach optimizes the prices, performance, density, information security and energy consumption. Using the innovative optical solutions it also protects the investments enclosed in the existing copper cable infrastructures. This approach will help customers to optimize capital and current expenses in the conditions of the current transition to technology 40G and future transition to 100G.