I know this is fundamental and I can find out in Google but so many people differ themselves when they talk about network "fabric". Kindly elaborate on this ?
As infra has laid out so picturesquely, a fabric is a network where everything is interconnected. There is no rigid, official definition, but very often when talking about a fabric it is implied that
- there is "sufficient" bandwidth between any two nodes, so that the network is never a bottleneck
- there is adequate redundancy, so that the fabric cannot fail
- any arbitrary connection has low latency
Pretty obviously, that isn't really possible on the physical layer for a non-trivial network, so fabric is usually applied to the data-link-layer structure (L2) of a network (or some part of it). Sometimes it is also applied to a network-layer topology (L3) when it is especially high-bandwidth, low-latency and redundant.
A simple fabric could be a small SAN with Fibre Channel or iSCSI that uses two switches and redundant multipathing between hosts and storage arrays. A complex fabric could be a multi-site, distributed core network connected by direct fiber.
-
2Just adding that some of us interpret "fabric" much more generally, in particular about the failure properties, and use it just to mean the "underlying non-specific connections, normally considered fit for the task". But certainly more mesh-like than arbitrary-network-like, though I think that is changing. I've certainly heard it applied to IP, ethernet, and MPLS. – jonathanjo Feb 7 '20 at 10:49
I think you have an Idea about Fabric. It means clothes. Now just think how cloth is made with yarn. Everything is inter-connected.
See this Image. You will get the idea.
Network Fabric is also something like this and Network Fabric is Network Topology that we can use to transfer data through inter-connecting switches and network components.
