Fast Packet

A data center networking standard that's not so TRILLing

Rivka Gewirtz Little, Senior Site Editor

This was the year we were supposed to bid farewell to the spanning tree protocol and say hello to the flat data center network. To do that, some said we should use the Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) protocol,

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a data center networking protocol that allows Layer 3 routing among Layer 2 devices. This would replace spanning tree and free up more Layer 2 paths, creating a friendlier environment for massive VM migration.

But Juniper Networks engineer and Fast Packet blogger, Anjan Venkatramani takes issue with this theory. In his blog “Why TRILL won't work for data center network architecture,” Venkatramani says TRILL “ignores important trends, including the need for varying types of VLANs for segmentation in cloud networks.”

In fact, Venkatramani goes so far as to say that TRILL offers no answer for Layer 3 multi-pathing and actually fails at the multi-tenancy necessary for cloud networking.

Read Venkatramani's Fast Packet blog on TRILL’s lacklustre capabilities.

Next up, everybody loves a network fabric, right? Maybe not.


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