When was the upgrade carried out?
As announced on the 6th of October 2022, the complete switching infrastructure was successfully renewed. This work took place during the night from Tuesday, from the 25th of October 2022 to Wednesday the 26th of October 2022, between 01:00 and 05:00.
Architecture
We restructured our data centres into a Spine-Leaf architecture to achieve the following goals:
- Redundancy
- Bandwidth
- Scalability
The diagram at the bottom of this page highlights the structure of the spine-leaf based switching infrastructure.
The rebuild of the switching infrastructure provides more redundancy
Instead of Layer 2 switching, the modern Layer 3 protocol BGP Ethernet VPN (EVPN) is implemented, which makes the detection and handling of faulty connections easier and more reliable. With this restructuring, there is no longer a "single point of failure" (SPOF) in the entire stepping stone AG infrastructure.
Increased bandwidth
The spine switches in the two data centres are connected to each other with a bandwidth of 2 x 100 Gbit/s, which is a 10-fold increase compared to the previous solution. Future expansion up to 4 x 100 Gbit/s is also possible while maintaining the current switching infrastructure. The spines to the leaves are also connected with a bandwidth of 2 x 100 Gbit/s each.
The improved speed is most noticeable in storage. Since the upgrade, the individual storage servers have a bandwidth of 2 x 40 Gbit/s (previously: 4 x 10 Gbit/s). Previously, the speed of the storage servers was limited by the network.
High scalability
Additional racks can each be connected to the spine switches with two leaf switches without having to adapt the architecture of the switching infrastructure.
