Infinetics has designed and implemented Long Hop™, a high performance network connection architecture that provides significantly better tradeoffs between bandwidth, latency, fault tolerance and cost than previously known approaches. Long Hop networks are more cost efficient than a fat-tree, supporting at least 50% more servers using the same network hardware while providing equivalent bandwidth and improved latency of at least 25%. Oversubscription and fault tolerance can also be smoothly varied to meet cost and performance goals. Long Hop’s regular wiring patterns maximize the number of short connections and minimize the number of long distance connections between server rows or containers, thereby reducing cabling costs and simplifying expansion by reducing or eliminating rewiring. Long Hop networks well serve the needs of modern data centers by providing consistent bandwidth under varying load conditions via extensive multi-path support and automatic load balancing, allowing mobile workloads to be placed without regard to available bandwidth, and allowing services to be isolated in a multi-tenant environment to match the business needs of customers.
Long Hop achieves this by combining patent-pending wiring methods with a simple high-performance, TCAM-efficient forwarding method well suited to the current generation of network switch hardware and SDN controllers supporting OpenFlow or proprietary southbound APIs. The wiring method starts with a highly symmetrical framework well suited to economical, fault tolerant switching, and overlays another symmetrical network of short cuts that simultaneously amplify available bandwidth as well as reduce latency. The end result gives the ability to design and construct networks that precisely meet implementation-specific business needs.