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US 8,570,856 B2Granted
Global ports in multi-switch systems
AssigneeIntel Corporation
InventorsRobert Southworth, Uri Cummings, Zhi-Hern Loh
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Global ports are supported in multi-switch systems having arbitrary topologies. In some implementations, global ports are implemented in a manner which makes the switch system robust in the face of link failure. In specific Ethernet implementations, global ports enable flooding, learning, forwarding, and link aggregation across the switch system.
Claims24
A switch device comprising:
- first local physical ports including a first physical port to couple the switch device to a spine switch of a switch system, wherein the switch device configured to operate as a first leaf switch of the switch system, wherein the switch system comprises a plurality of switches to operate as a single global switch including a plurality of global ports;
- and
- first switching logic to facilitate a transfer of a first frame of data among the first local physical ports, the first switching logic including global port mapping logic configured to map each of a plurality of global port identifiers to a corresponding subset of the first local physical ports, wherein each of the plurality of global port identifiers is unique within the switch system and represents one or more of the global ports, the first switching logic configured to detect an absence of a mapping of the first destination media access control (MAC) address to a global port identifier, wherein, in response to the detected absence, the first switching logic to send the first frame of data to the spine switch with a representation of a flood address, wherein, based on the representation of the flood address, the spine switch to flood the first frame of data to a second leaf switch of the switch system independent of any destination MAC address lookup performed by the spine switch for the first frame of data.
A switch system comprising:
- a plurality of switches configured to operate as a single global switch including a plurality of global ports, the plurality of switches including a spine switch, a first leaf switch and a second leaf switch, the first leaf switch comprising:
- first local physical ports including a first physical port to couple the first leaf switch to the spine switch;
- and
- first switching logic to facilitate a transfer of a first frame of data among the first local physical ports, the first switching logic including global port mapping logic configured to map each of a plurality of global port identifiers to a corresponding subset of the first local physical ports, wherein each of the plurality of global port identifiers is unique within the global switch and represents one or more of the global ports, the first switching logic configured to detect an absence of a mapping of the first destination media access control (MAC) address to a global port identifier, wherein, in response to the detected absence, the first switching logic to send the first frame of data to the spine switch with a representation of a flood address;
- and
- the spine switch including logic, responsive to the representation of the flood address, to flood the first frame of data to the second leaf switch independent of any destination MAC address lookup performed by the spine switch for the first frame of data.
3 more elements
A data center comprising:
- a plurality of switches configured to operate as a single global switch including a plurality of global ports, the plurality of switches including a first core switch, a first top-of-rack (ToR) switch and a second ToR switch, the first ToR switch comprising:
- first local physical ports including a first physical port to couple the first ToR switch to the core switch;
- and
- first switching logic to facilitate a transfer of a first frame of data among the first local physical ports, the first switching logic including global port mapping logic configured to map each of a plurality of global port identifiers to a corresponding subset of the first local physical ports, wherein each of the plurality of global port identifiers is unique within the single global switch and represents one or more of the global ports, the first switching logic configured to detect an absence of a mapping of the first destination media access control (MAC) address to a global port identifier, wherein, in response to the detected absence, the first switching logic to send the first frame of data to the core switch with a representation of a flood address;
- the core switch including logic, responsive to the representation of the flood address, to flood the first frame of data to the second ToR switch independent of any destination MAC address lookup performed by the core switch for the first frame of data;
- and
- a plurality of servers connected to each of the first ToR switch and the second ToR switch.
4 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.