Switched fabric

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Example topology of a Fibre Channel switched fabric network

Switched fabric is a computer network topology where many devices connect with each other via switches, used in some storage area networks and other high-speed interconnects, including Fibre Channel and InfiniBand.

Switched fabric networks are different from typical hierarchical switched networks (e.g. Ethernet) in that switched fabric networks naturally support redundant paths between multiple devices, forming a mesh network with devices being on the "edges" of the mesh. One of the advantages of this topology is failover, meaning that in case one link breaks or a switch is out of order, datagrams can traverse alternate paths. Another is scalability, meaning that more switches can be added as the number of endpoints increases so the route length (and thus, latency and throughput) can remain constant for point-to-point datagrams.

[edit] Switched fabric in Fibre Channel

In the Fibre Channel switched fabric topology (called FC-SW), devices are connected to each other through a network of Fibre Channel switches. This topology allows the connection of up to the theoretical maximum of 16 million devices, limited only by the available address space (2²⁴). Larger fabrics are typically divided into zones to facilitate maintenance. While this topology has the best scalability properties, it is also the most expensive, requiring at least one switch to establish a connection between devices.