During last one year, almost all switching vendors had either launched or are planning to launch multipathing technology or ECMP into Datacenter Fabrics but the irony is, In this era of consolidation and convergence every OEM had launched something proprietary in this domain.
TRILL (Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links) & SPB (Shortest Path Bridging) seems to have emerged like a savior but both of these technologies are in there draft version. Most of the OEMs had either adopted TRILL or SPB for their Datacenter switches. Cisco's Fabricpath is a customized TRILL based technology. Brocade again had used TRILL for their technology called VCS but it too is the highly customized version, where they are using their experience from fiber channels and used the same technology.
Juniper on top of all of them had designed and released another impressive technology called QFabric. Which can provide you any to any direct connectivity in the network and still keeping down the latency to maximum of 5 Ms and not to forget QFabric is purely a Juniper developed technology and it doesn't uses either of the ECMP technology (Neither TRILL nor SPB)
On the other hand, OEMs like Avaya, Huawei, Extreme and Alcaltel-Lucent are widely supporting and adopting SPB. They had implemented more or less customized versions of SPB into their Datacenter products.
Vendors and pundits often gloss over the intricate differences between
the two standards, probably because most of us lack the
technical knowledge to grasp the finer points involved. Vendors are
embracing one standard or the other and it remains to be seen what the
consequences of this divergence will be. Today it seems like every OEM is trying to take the entire pie of the Datacenter switching and want to bind the customer with their patented and proprietary features.
Now the only question remains is - How do they plan to provide inter-operability with other vendors ? Will it be a layer 3 protocol doing it or STP would still be the necessary EVIL.
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