Hyperconverged Infrastructures (HCI) offer management simplicity and provisioning agility to data centers undergoing digital transformation. When applications need more compute or storage resources, IT can "simply add a node” to an existing HCI cluster. But as the HCI environment scales out, complexity increases and network resources become a significant architectural consideration, often with significant unexpected costs that can blow your HCI budget.

1. Webinar
How Software-Defined Networking
Can Simplify Scale-Out HCI
Three Problem Areas to Overcome
for Pros Considering or
Expanding HCI Need
1. The Time Required to Network in a New Code
2. The Network Costs as Node Count Increases
3. Troubleshooting a Large Shared-Everything Infrastructure
For audio playback and Q&A go to: http://bit.ly/SimplifyHCI

2. Our Speakers
Gregg Holzrichter is an enterprise B2B marketing veteran who has worked in multiple data center
infrastructure categories, and brings to Big Switch nearly 25 years of deep domain expertise across
marketing disciplines. Gregg oversees Big Switch's global marketing organization, which has
positioned Big Switch as a Visionary in the Gartner Datacenter Magic Quadrant in 2017, established
Big Switch as the leading provider of next-generation datacenter networking solutions, and delivers
outbound programs to help fuel the company's growth of over 100% yearly.
George Crump is the founder of Storage Switzerland, the leading storage analyst focused on the
subjects of big data, solid state storage, virtualization, cloud computing and data protection. He is
widely recognized for his articles, white papers, and videos on such current approaches as all-flash
arrays, deduplication, SSDs, software-defined storage, backup appliances, and storage networking.
He has over 25 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US.

3. ● Simplify Provisioning
● Simplify Scaling of Performance
● Simplify Scaling of Capacity
● The Problem is, at scale, the
network becomes a problem
The Goal of Hyperconverged Infrastructure

4. ● Heavy East-West-traffic across
servers / storage nodes
● Network can’t scale as incrementally
as HCI
Networking Problems of At-Scale HCI

5. ● Network requires manual intervention
as nodes and VMs are provisioned
● Troubleshooting problems is difficult
● HCI is based on open, industry
standards but network is closed and
proprietary
Networking Problems of At-Scale HCI

6. How SDN Addresses HCI At-Scale Networking Problems

7. Addressing the East -
West Traffic Problem
● SDN can leverage white box
network switches
● Makes 10G / 25G / 40G / 100G
more affordable
● Can automatically create link
aggregation groups

8. Incremental
Fabric Scaling
● No need for core switch /
director
● Multiple white box
network switches are
managed as one
● Essentially brings HCI
scale out to the network

9. ● Physical network is automatically
provisioned and configured as virtual
machines are provisioned
● New HCI nodes are automatically
discovered by SDN solution
● Nodes can be added / moved / replaced
without network team involvement
● But network team has full visibility into HCI
Network Automation

10. Trouble-Free
Troubleshooting ● SDN provides end-to-end visibility
○ Host names, host vmNICs and
physical fabric interfaces
○ VM names, VM Mac & IP
addresses, VM description
● VM to VM Fabric Trace
● Fabric Analytics

11. ● Turnkey or Software-Only, all HCI are
based on open, industry standard hardware
● HCI storage is also based on industry
standard hardware
● Yet switch fabrics are closed and
proprietary
● SDN, again, allows the use of white box
switches from a variety of vendors all
managed as if they were one big switch
Open Needs Open

12. Summary
● If HCI can’t be managed at
scale then it is limited to point
projects
● SDN brings automation and
cost effectiveness to the HCI
network
● Enables organizations to afford
to deploy higher performing
networks

13. NEXT-GENERATION DC NETWORKING JOURNEY
12 © 2018, BIG SWITCH NETWORKS, INC. PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
1990’s CLIs
L3 Agg
L2
Access
L2
Access
L2
Access
L2
Access
L3 Agg
FW rule
app2-
>db2
FW
rule
allo
w
web7ACL
port 22
allow
tcp 80
vlan
105-
108
vla
n
225
-
318allow
tcp 22
Next-Generation DC NetworkingLegacy DC Networking
Clean
Slate
Program
Intent Validate Analytics
SDN
Controls
Open
Switches
Fabric
Pods
1990+
Box-based
Networking
2008+ 2014+ 2017+
Hyperscale-inspired
Networking
Intent-based
Networking
Cloud-native
Networking
Dynamic Scale-out Predictive
CI/CD DevOps
Workflow
Legacy Network is a
ROAD-BLOCK
Cloud-native Networking delivers FREEDOM
1 32 41 32 4
Add
Switch
Form
Fabric
Upgrade
Complex Manual Lock-in

14. BIG SWITCH’S CLOUD-NATIVE NETWORKING
Ideal Network for Cloud-native Apps
13 © 2018, BIG SWITCH NETWORKS, INC. PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
2015
Ideal Fabric
for OpenStack
2016
Ideal Fabric
for VMware SDDC
2017
Ideal Fabric
for Containers
2018
Ideal Fabric
for HCI
Cloud Automation
Freedom to Innovate
Zero-touch Operations
Freedom to Run Fast
Deep Telemetry
Freedom to Reduce Complexity
HW Choice
Freedom from Vendor Lock-in
Networking at the speed of virtualization and cloud

15. BIG CLOUD FABRIC: IDEAL SDN FABRIC FOR HCI
14
vSAN +
Built-in Network Automation
• Auto-configuration of HCI nodes
• Auto-creation of L2 Network
End-to-End Visibility & Troubleshooting
• VM-level Visibility
• VM-to-VM Fabric-Trace
• HCI-aware Visibility & Analytics
BCF BENEFITS for HCI
© 2018, BIG SWITCH NETWORKS, INC.
Big Cloud
Fabric

16. BIG CLOUD FABRIC & NUTANIX HCI
Ideal Leaf-Spine Fabric for Nutanix HCI
15
ESXi Servers
Storage
SWITCH LIGHT OS SWITCH LIGHT OS SWITCH LIGHT OS
SWITCH LIGHT OS SWITCH LIGHT OS
L2 + L3 CLOS FABRIC
MANAGED BY SDN CONTROLLER
SWITCH LIGHT OS
Open Network Linux (ONL) Based OS
for Dell-ON or Whitebox Switches
© 2018, BIG SWITCH NETWORKS, INC.
L2 + L3 CLOS FABRIC
Native VM Mobility
BIG CLOUD FABRIC
CONTROLLER (CLI or GUI)
Full Automation for Provisioning,
HA/Resiliency & Management
ORHCESTRATION
SYSTEM
Nutanix Prism + VMware
vCenter

17. AUTOMATED WORKFLOWS: HCI HOSTS
16 © 2017, BIG SWITCH NETWORKS, INC. PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Big Cloud
Fabric
Add HCI Host...
Automatically admitted to fabric
(No MLAG config necessary)
Host-level visibility:
Host name, Host OS, vSwitch, PNICs
Any leaf/
leaf pair
Nutanix Node Name (auto detected)
Node is automatically connected with
Rack-2 leaf switches (via LAG/MLAG)

18. AUTOMATED WORKFLOWS: HCI VMs
17 © 2017, BIG SWITCH NETWORKS, INC. PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Big Cloud Fabric
Host
VM VM
Add HCI VM…
VM
L2 network automatically added
VM-level Visibility:
VM name, Guest OS, vNIC
Any Segment
Any Host
Any Leaf
Nutanix VM
L2 Segment
(auto config)
Nutanix VM
(auto detect)

19. BCF NUTANIX SOLUTION – TROUBLESHOOTING
18 © 2018, BIG SWITCH NETWORKS, INC.
Test Path
Spine 3Spine 1 Spine 2
R1L1
R1L2
R3L1
R3L2
R2L1
R2L2
Nutanix-VM1
25.25.25.11
Spine
Leaf
Nutanix-VM2
25.25.25.12
Ethernet 21
Ethernet 50
Ethernet 7Ethernet 3
Ethernet 50
Source
BIG CLOUD FABRIC
CONTROLLER
(CLI, GUI, API)
Destination
One-click flow trace across the fabric
No box-by-box hopping
Ethernet 3

20. Thank you!
Storage Switzerland
http://www.storageswiss.com
georgeacrump@storageswiss.com
StorageSwiss on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/storageswiss
StorageSwiss on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/storageswiss
Big Switch Networks
https://www.bigswitch.com
Big Switch Networks on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/bigswitch
Big Switch Networks on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/bigswitchnetworks

21. How Software-Defined Networking
Can Simplify Scale-Out HCI
For complete Audio and Q&A please register for the On Demand Version at:
http://bit.ly/SimplifyHCI