The CCF architecture consists of a physical switching fabric,

which is based on a leaf-spine Clos architecture. Leaf and spine

switches running Switch Light™ Operating System form the

individual nodes of this physical fabric. Intelligence in the fabric

is hierarchically placed—most of it in the CCF Controller (where

configuration, automation and troubleshooting occur), and

some of it off-loaded to Switch Light for resiliency and scale-out.

Converged Cloud Fabric System Components

• Converged Cloud Fabric Controller — a centralized and

hierarchically implemented SDN controller available as an

HA pair of hardware appliances for high availability.

• Open Networking Leaf and Spine Switch Hardware

— the term ‘open networking’ (whitebox or britebox)

refers to the fact that the Ethernet switches are shipped

without an embedded networking OS. The merchant

silicon networking ASICs used in these switches are the

same as used by most incumbent switch vendors and

have been widely deployed in production in hyperscale

data center networks. These bare metal switches ship with

Open Network Install Environment (ONIE) for automatic

and vendor-agnostic installation of third-party network

OS. A variety of switch HW configurations and vendors are

available on the CCF hardware compatibility list.

• Switch Light Operating System — a light-weight open

networking switch OS purpose built for SDN

• Converged Cloud Fabric Automation Plugins (optional)

— Converged Cloud Fabric has built-in E-VPC network

automation for private cloud platforms including VMware

vSphere/NSX/vSAN, DellEMC VxRail HCI, Nutanix HCI,

Microsoft Hyper-V, Kubernetes containers and OpenStack.

Deployment Solutions

CCF is designed from the ground up to satisfy the requirements

of physical, virtual or combination of physical and virtual

workloads. It supports a wide variety of data center and private

cloud use cases, including:

• VMware SDDC workloads (vSphere, NSX, Virtual SAN and

VIO)

• Converged and Hyper-converged Systems (HCI) with

Nutanix and Dell EMC VxRail

• Microsoft Hyper-V workloads

• OpenStack including NFV

• Kubernetes orchestrated containerized workloads

• Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workloads

Datasheet

arista.com

arista.com

arista.com

arista.com

Figure 1: Converged Cloud Fabric (One Logical Switch)

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