MAINTENANCE AND POWER SAVINGS IN LARGE MULTIPLANE DATA CENTER FABRICS

Within a Data Center (DC) environment network upgrades are often challenging and may consume significant amounts of time and network administrator resources. Additionally, DC networks tend to consume large amounts of energy and dissipate considerable amounts of heat that can be challenging to evacuate in densely populated fabrics. To address these challenges techniques are presented herein that support, possibly among other things, the construction of a network model; the use of Machine Learning (ML) to predict low and high load periods and, in low periods, determining the ratio of resources that may be taken offline; updating the equal-cost multi-path (ECMP) rules in the leaves to avoid selected planes so as to take the full plane spine and super-spine nodes offline; and upgrading one of the super-spine nodes and then one of the spine nodes to ensure that there is always a rollback path in case of a problem. If the upgrading is successful, the techniques may include proceeding to upgrade all of the super-spine nodes and all of the spine nodes

MULTICAST OPERATIONS, ADMINISTRATION, AND MANAGEMENT (OAM) TECHNIQUES UTILIZING PROTOCOL INDEPENDENT MULTICAST (PIM) FLOODING MECHANISMS

Multicast networks are often complex and to provide a visualization of traffic flows within a multicast network often involves the full knowledge of a distribution tree for the network. Further, isolating problems within a multicast network can involve tracing of multiple nodes across the distribution tree. Techniques presented provide efficient multicast tree discovery through Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) flooding mechanisms, which can be further used to facilitate network visualizations and fault isolation within a network

HITLESS GRACEFUL INSERTION AND REMOVAL OF A ROUTER/SWITCH IN HIGHLY RELIABLE MULTICAST NETWORKS

Currently, the support for graceful insertion and removal (GIR) within a Protocol-Independent Multicast (PIM) environment is limited. As a result, there is no mechanism today that allows for a soft migration of flows when, for example, planning for a maintenance window. Techniques are presented herein that support a hitless upgrade capability that avoids impacting any flow during the upgrade and reload of a spine switch. This is the most difficult task today for customer networks, where multicast flows run all of the time and no disruption is acceptable. Aspects of the presented techniques include a new PIM hello message type-length-value (TLV) option. Such an option may be referred to herein as a progressive graceful insertion and removal (PGIR) capability option