Key Advantages; Distributed Core Terminology - Dell Active Fabric Manager Deployment Manual

NOTE: There are no uplinks on the spines. All the leaves have downlinks. The uplink should be configured in the
first two leaves.

Key Advantages

The key advantages of a distributed core architecture are:
• Simplified fabric
• Higher bandwidth
• Highly resilient
• Higher availability
• Low power consumption
• Less cooling
• Lower latency
• Lower cost
• Less rack space
• Easier to scale

Distributed Core Terminology

The following terms are unique to the design and deployment of a Layer 3 distributed core fabric.
• Leaf — A switch that connects switch, servers, storage devices, or top-of-rack (TOR) elements. The role of the
leaf switch is to provide access to the fabric. The leaf switch connects to all of spines above it in the fabric.
• Spine — A switch that connects to leaf switches. The role of the spine is to provide an interconnect to all the
leaf switches. All the ports on the spine switches are used to connect the leaves, various racks together. The
spines provides load balancing and redundancy in the distributed core. There are no uplinks on the spines.
• Edge ports — The uplinks and downlinks on the leaves.
• Uplinks — An edge port link on the first two leaves in the distributed core fabric that connects to the edge WAN,
which typically connects to an internet server provider (ISP). Uplinks are always 10 GbE.
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