A network system for a data center is described in which a switch fabric provides interconnectivity such that any servers may communicate packet data to any other of the servers using any of a number of parallel data paths. Moreover, according to the techniques described herein, edge-positioned access nodes, permutation devices and core switches of the switch fabric may be configured and arranged in a way such that the parallel data paths provide single L2/L3 hop, full mesh interconnections between any pairwise combination of the access nodes, even in massive data centers having tens of thousands of servers. The access nodes may be arranged within access node groups, and permutation devices may be used within the access node groups to spray packets across the access node groups prior to injection within the switch fabric, thereby increasing the fanout and scalability of the network system.

A network switch includes a field programmable gate array (FPGA) and a processor. The FPGA is configured to transfer a processing target packet to a transfer destination, based on transfer definition information, and to transfer a copy of the processing target packet to the processor. The processor is configured to delete an entry of the transfer definition information based on a transfer record information, and to update the transfer record information based on the copy of the processing target packet.

Some embodiments of the invention provide a forwarding element that can be configured through in-band data-plane messages from a remote controller that is a physically separate machine from the forwarding element. The forwarding element of some embodiments has data plane circuits that include several configurable message-processing stages, several storage queues, and a data-plane configurator. A set of one or more message-processing stages of the data plane are configured (1) to process configuration messages received by the data plane from the remote controller and (2) to store the configuration messages in a set of one or more storage queues. The data-plane configurator receives the configuration messages stored in the set of storage queues and configures one or more of the configurable message-processing stages based on configuration data in the configuration messages.

A system, method, and computer program product for implementing network state processing is provided. The method includes detecting operational states for ports of a server Internet protocol (IP) data plane component of an integrated switching device. Each operational state is analyzed and matching and action rules associated with the operational states are generated with respect to data packets arriving at the ports. Data describing each operational state is stored within a port cache structure of a port. An incoming data packet is detected at a first port and the matching and action rules are distributed between port engines of the ports. The matching and action rules are executed with respect to the incoming data packet and the incoming data packet is transmitted to a destination port. Operational functionality of the integrated switching device is enabled with respect to execution of the incoming data packet at the destination port.

A network system includes P upper switches, Q lower switches, and a first mapping device. Each upper switch of the P upper switches includes a plurality of upper ports. A group of upper switches selected from the P upper switches includes P1 upper switches. Each lower switch of the Q lower switches includes a plurality of upper ports. The first mapping device includes P1 upper adapter terminals coupled to a part of upper ports of the P1 upper switches, and P1 lower adapter terminals coupled to lower ports of a part of Q lower switches. The first mapping device is used for allocating a plurality of transmitting channels and receiving channels received by each upper adapter terminal to the P1 lower adapter terminals.

A network system includes P upper switches, Q lower switches, and a first mapping device. Each upper switch of the P upper switches includes a plurality of upper ports. A group of upper switches selected from the P upper switches includes P1 upper switches. Each lower switch of the Q lower switches includes a plurality of upper ports. The first mapping device includes P1 upper adapter terminals coupled to a part of upper ports of the P1 upper switches, and P1 lower adapter terminals coupled to lower ports of a part of Q lower switches. The first mapping device is used for allocating a plurality of transmitting channels and receiving channels received by each upper adapter terminal to the P1 lower adapter terminals.

A SDN orchestration method includes: obtaining a first request for creating a first logical switch; creating a control plane instance of the first logical switch, and sending first configuration information to instruct the first forwarding device to configure the data plane instance of the first logical switch; obtaining a second request for connecting the first logical switch to a first logical router; sending second configuration information to instruct the first forwarding device to configure a first port of the data plane instance of the first logical switch to be communicatively connected to a second port of a data plane instance of the first logical router on the second forwarding device configured with the data plane instance of the first logical router; and sending third configuration information to instruct the second forwarding device to configure the second port to be communicatively connected to the first port.

A storage system determines source addresses, and destination addresses in a storage system, for network traffic. The storage system determines a hash algorithm, from a plurality of hash algorithms. The hash algorithm is to be used across the source addresses for load-balancing the network traffic to the destination addresses. The storage system determines that the hash algorithm more closely meets one or more load-balancing criteria than at least one other hash algorithm, of the plurality of hash algorithms. The storage system distributes the network traffic from the source addresses to the destination addresses in the storage system, with load-balancing according to the determined hash algorithm.

Methods and devices for provisioning a hyper-converged infrastructure of bare metal systems are disclosed herein. Two fabric elements are configured in a master-slave arrangement to ensure high availability. ONIE capable fabric elements may be pre-installed with an operating system as firmware to run open network operating systems, such as Linux. The Linux operating system includes a KVM hypervisor to run virtual machines. An operating system of the virtual machines can access an external network by creating a bridge between switch management ports and a virtual network interface. New node elements may be added by connecting the network ports of the new node element to the fabric elements and booting the new node element in a network/PXE boot mode. The new node element obtains an IP address from a DHCP server and boots an image downloaded from a PXE server.

Examples include techniques for virtual Ethernet switching of a multi-node fabric. In some examples, first Ethernet links coupled with a group of Ethernet gateways are link aggregated. The group of Ethernet gateways couple with respective individual physical switch ports of a fabric switch of a multi-node fabric to form a default logical gateway to provide an uplink between a virtual Ethernet switch and an Ethernet network external to the multi-node fabric. Also, one or more individual Ethernet gateways coupled with respective individual physical switch ports of the fabric switch may be arranged to provide one or more respective downlinks between the virtual Ethernet switch and one or more Ethernet nodes external to the multi-node fabric via respective second Ethernet links coupled with the one or more individual Ethernet gateways.